


Five Years

by falloutforties



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Slow Burn, also not impressed by the 'dead husband' thing, but dogmeat is here and that's what counts, emotionally unavailable egghead, justice for glory because i LOVE her, not super concerned about my kidnapped son tbh, todd h is a coward who won't let me romance deacon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 58,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falloutforties/pseuds/falloutforties
Summary: The second she crawled out of that vault, dead cockroach meat in her pocket and tongue still not completely thawed, she knew she didn’t have to lie anymore. No more candy-striped wallpaper coating the halls, no more perfect wife and mother. She was no one. She was everyone. She didn’t sugarcoat her feelings, she didn’t hold her tongue. And it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate that honesty, it’s that he had to mix in his honesty with a little sweet prevarication, like rum and coke, but she was straight vodka, and he was starting to feel a little dizzy.Set in a world in which David Bowie did exist at one time, because the author can’t imagine a world in which he didn’t.
Relationships: Deacon & Female Sole Survivor, Deacon/Female Sole Survivor, Deacon/Sole Survivor, Deacon/Sole Survivor (Fallout)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 68





	1. TOTAL ATOMIC ANNIHILATION!

_ I. TOTAL ATOMIC ANNIHILATION! _

When she woke up in the morning, she knew the exact percentage of how likely she was to die that day, down to the decimal. It was not like a superpower, per se, just a sixth sense. An awareness, she might call it. She was incredibly aware of herself. 

She couldn’t sense this clearly in other people, though she did have a sense of it. A vague direction as to how closely they’ll come to seeing their entire life flash before their eyes. She had seen it once or twice in Nate’s eyes over the breakfast table— a tint of green in his brown eyes that wasn’t there the day before, almost like a warning. 

_Something’s going to happen. It might not be bad, or it might be terrible. But it’s something._

She watched him turn his nose up at the box of Sugar Bombs sat on the countertop, favoring instead a cup of coffee and half a tato. She waited patiently for him to start his bi-weekly diatribe against the SugarTooth Corporation and their devious aims against the children of the Commonwealth. 

“ _Did you know there’s a Sugar Bombs factory in Beijing?”_ He’d mentioned, several months ago for the first time. She was honestly just excited to hear that he’d managed to establish a new argument, though she wasn’t convinced that the Sugar Bombs factory in Beijing was a direct link to Childhood Communism as much as it was just outright standard capitalism. 

When he finally settled at the table with his half-tato in one hand, coffee in the other, and Boston Bugle folded neatly under his arm, she watched his eyes. He was looking a little green, and she wondered errantly if perhaps he’d be scraped by a car while crossing the street. She herself, however, was at a solid 15%, which was a little higher than her standard measurements, but nothing out of the ordinary or concerning. Perhaps she would break a finger, sprain her ankle, crack a tooth on a Nuka-Cola bottle. 

She appreciated the extra air of danger. 

Life in Sanctuary was beautifully but painfully dull, less dull now that there was a child in the house, but dull nonetheless. Now, the stale quiet that usually settled over the house in the afternoon was permeated by the frequent cries and laughs of the child and the exclamations of their brand new housekeeper, who thought the child was a marvel of modern science.

He was, at the very moment his parents were eating breakfast, sleeping in his crib in the back room, the powder blue of his walls shielding him like a personal sky and he went completely unaware of everyone around him. He had the enviable manner of a child, crying whenever he felt a slight discomfort, laughing at the simplest of things.

She wished sometimes she could burst into tears just because she was hungry, weep at the thought of being sleepy. It had been so long since someone had properly addressed her humanity that she thought if someone held her against their chest, she’d fall asleep, just like the child did at night when she rocked him. 

“Mum,” Codsworth chirped as he hovered into the kitchen with a wet rag in one hand and a rattle in the other. 

“Morning, Codsworth,” she replied with a mouth full of cereal. She was not too good for Sugar Bombs, and if they were implanting Communist Tracking Chips into her brain, well, that was a risk she was going to have to take. As long as she was the one who had to do the grocery shopping, she was not going to deny herself the simple pleasure of marshmallow cereal. 

“Young Shaun should be asleep for approximately the next two hours.”

“Thank you, Codsworth.”

Nora _loved_ Codsworth. There were days when she thought of him more as a husband than Nate. Codsworth, in his thrumming metallic voice, asked her everyday how she was feeling. Nate sometimes quirked his brow at her, and she nodded in response, but their marital conversation was frustratingly dry. 

_Like Sugar Bombs without milk._

Chip Harris was grandstanding on the news, and his thick croon filled the background of the house with a pleasant sort of domestic white noise along with the gentle _clink_ of her silverware and the crinkling of Nate’s paper. She tuned her ears for a moment to Chip’s voice as he read from a teleprompter about some new information about China’s secret nuclear plants. 

_Everyone has nukes nowadays,_ she thought bitterly. Her Sugar Bombs were now soggy. _Why are we allowed to hide them, but China has to send us a report or else we accuse them of some kind of crime?_

She absentmindedly wondered if having a crush on the newscaster might turn her into more of a nuclear housewife. She knew Natalie Hawthorne had a crush on Chip Harris. She watched him every morning, even had a signed picture of him that she kept in her nightstand. Mr. Hawthorne was fine with it, of course, because no one in Sanctuary Hills could even prove that Chip Harris was real. No one could prove that he wasn’t just an incredibly advanced Protectron— a Mr. Handy in a pinstripe suit. Mr. Hawthorne didn’t have to worry about Chip Harris stealing his wife.

A knock on the door broke Nora’s concentration. 

“Must be that sales guy,” Nate intoned, obviously bored senseless by the notion of a salesman at the door. “He’s been asking for you all morning.”

“All morning? I didn’t even hear him knock before now.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you sleep until 9 AM.”

_Thank you, Nora, for staying up until the Devil’s Ass-Crack of dawn comforting a weeping child. Thank you for feeding him while I put earplugs in and turned over to the cold side of the pillow so I could go back to sleep. I answered the door for you, and the salesman gave me a free ticket to Fuck-Off-Ville, and I’m taking the child with me. You and Codsworth have fun now!_

A woman could dream. 

The salesman at the door was a weasel-looking fellow with an awfully mustardy-colored coat and matching hat. His smile seemed like it might be genuine, but based on the wrinkles that beamed from the corners of his eyes, it seemed he was well-versed in faking a good smile.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am! I am glad you took the time to answer the door today, because what I am about to tell you is a matter of _utmost importance,_ ” he promised, his smile somehow extended as he emphasized _utmost importance._

“Utmost importance, huh? Glad I answered the door, then.”

“As you should be. Because of your family’s service in the military, you are eligible for entrance into the local vault— Vault 111!”

She eyed him warily before glancing up towards the hill at the end of the cul-de-sac. She had remembered the day Vault-Tec had started construction into the hillside, promising the neighborhood that _“We won’t work until 9 AM, we’ll be gone in a flash, and you and your family will soon be protected in the unlikely event of total atomic annihilation!”_

She didn’t buy the working until 9 AM part, she was skeptical about them being gone in a flash, and she hadn’t taken the time to assess the thought of _total atomic annihilation_. That was something that happened to people in the movies, or on radio shows, not in Sanctuary Hills. _Total atomic annihilation_ might actually spice up her life, if it deigned to come close to Sanctuary Hills.

“Thanks,” she mentioned passively, ignoring the clipboard that was slowly being edged towards her. “My family too?”

“Yes, of course! Except the robot, mind you. Would you mind taking a few moments to fill out some paperwork?”

Nora turned her head to eye the situation inside the house before accepting the clipboard. If the salesman had knocked before, there was no reason to send him away then. He was working hard, and she appreciated the thought if not the persistence. 

“Excellent! Now you and your family are… _Prepared for the Future!”_

She gave a half-hearted laugh at the way he performed his reading of the motto— the Vault-Tec promise that had been broadcasted via billboard all over every cityscape and neighborhood nearby. If _total atomic annihilation_ never came around, Vault-Tec was sure going to look foolish. 

She shut the door and sauntered back over to the breakfast table, but just as she sat down, a cry rang through the house. Shaun was awake, and Nate was eyeing her above the folded edge of his paper. 

“Mum!” Codsworth chirped once again, hovering back into the kitchen. “Young Shaun seems to be inconsolable. Would you mind using some of that… maternal instinct you seem to be so good at?”

“Sure, Codsworth. Thank you.”

Once the door was closed in Shaun’s little room, she felt a great weight lift from her shoulders. True, she had not liked the child at first, but he was growing on her, and she appreciated the fact that he had to listen to everything she said without commentary or judgement. 

“ _You might be unsure now, but once that beautiful baby boy is handed to you in a pretty blue blanket, you’ll love him more than you’ve ever loved anything,”_ Natalie Hawthorne had told her at the baby shower in a moment of vulnerability. Nora had escaped the Hawthorne’s living room to cry in their bathroom, marking it up to hormones at first, but the second she looked in the mirror and saw that damned stomach of hers, the crying got worse. Natalie stumbled into the bathroom by accident, catching Nora in the midst of a coughing fit. 

So, Nora waited until Shaun was born, and when the nurse handed him to her, she stared at him and felt absolutely nothing. But she cooed and tickled his tiny feet, promising to herself that if she could just get the child home, maybe it would get better. Maybe it was the anesthetic and the drugs that made her so emotionless. It wasn’t. 

It was the fact that she hadn’t wanted a child at all, the fact that she hadn’t even really wanted a husband, but her parents had set her up with some soldier boy, fresh out of a set of power armor, and that was that. She would marry Nate because it was what she was supposed to do, not because she had fallen in love.

She adjusted Shaun’s cap before scooping him into her arms. 

“What do you have to cry about?” She muttered to the child. “You don’t have to pay taxes. You’re not going to have to wear heels and go grocery shopping and attend baby showers. You’re going to play catch in the backyard with your father, and then one day, some girl will marry you because she has to. You’re set for life, little buddy.”

Shaun merely gargled something, his hands grabbing for her hair. He was like a partially-sentient diary. She would pile her troubles on him, and he would go, “ _Ah!”_ And then go back to sleep. 

“I was thinking we could go to the park today,” Nate remarked as he stepped into the nursery. “Would you be interested?”

“Sure, sure. Might be nice to get some fresh air.” She had intended to say more, perhaps something about finishing her Halloween preparations, but when she turned to him, she saw his eyes fully for the first time that day, and Shaun nearly slipped from her grasp. 

“Woah, woah, hey,” Nate took the child from her arms. “You alright?”

“Yeah, I just… are you feeling alright?”

“Fine. You look pale, though. Maybe it’s all that _Chinese Cereal._ ”

She chuckled despite herself and maintained eye contact with as much focus as she could muster. His eyes were near fully green. She was sure it was nothing. It had to be nothing. They were going for a walk in the park, and besides, her percentage was still standing at a solid 15%. It was nothing.

But Chip Harris knew more than she did, and when Codsworth called them all into the living room, Chip Harris was, for the first time on the air, misty-eyed. His head was in his hands, the morning report discarded as he faced the camera with shaking eyes. 

“Shit,” Nora whispered, and Nate scolded her for her foul mouth. “Sorry, I just… is this it?”

“I think this is it.”

“Whatever it is, I will certainly miss you all dearly. Sir, Mum, Young Shaun. I believe this is goodbye.”

Codsworth’s goodbye started her heart thrumming at an unbelievable pace, and she kicked into gear, sweeping herself up from the loveseat and rushing towards the door, ushering Nate and Shaun behind her. 

This was it. This was the end of the world, but it wasn’t going to kill her. 


	2. BAD RADS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi folks! A couple people left some very kind notes on my last chapter, so thank you very much for your kind words. One commenter mentioned the "percent business", and quite frankly, I can't fully explain why I decided to include that. There's a little bit of an explanation for it later on, but in all honesty, it was just an idea that popped into my head while I was writing, and I grew kind of attached to it. Just a weird character quirk, I guess. I hope y'all enjoy this second chapter!! :)

_II. BAD RADS_

From the second she hit the ground, she decisively ignored the pang in the soles of her feet and sprinted across the mottled street, dodging upturned cars and pieces of unsettled tar that littered the road. The _thing_ was moving fast, faster than she would ever have imagined, sweeping great gusts of wind across the city as it moved. 

It was beautiful in an incredibly terrifying way, she had to give it that. If it were stuffed and displayed behind a glass case in a museum, she would have gawked at it, but it wasn’t stuffed, its heart was still beating, and she was losing stamina. 

“Fuck it!” She shouted and hoisted the mini-gun onto her hip with a wretched groan. Everything she did hurt her physically, but the thought of being ripped limb from limb by the creature seemed to hurt more, so she suffered the massive bruise that would certainly grow from her hip bone into her ribcage where the mini-gun sat spinning idly. 

“RED BUTTON!” Screamed Garvey from the museum’s balcony. “THERE’S A RED BUTTON! PRESS THE RED BUTTON! RED BUTTON!”

He kept repeating it, over and over, and it took her mind a few seconds to process before she spotted it, and the mini-gun began to whir at a frightening pace. As it heated up, the creature lunged towards her with the bloody debris of a raider stuck between its teeth and on its horns, dripping bits of lung onto the street. She could have vomited, but there was no time. She would have to reschedule. 

“GET FUCKED, YOU SLIMY BASTARD!” If her plan didn’t work, she would have looked foolish screaming such harsh words just before getting ripped apart. They would have been excellent last words, but they wouldn’t look very pretty printed on a marble tombstone. Much to her surprise, and the aesthetic benefit of her epitaph, the gun began firing right into the monster’s chest, finally sending it sprawling out across the street. 

As the ringing in her ears died, she watched the monster’s enormous chest heave ragged breaths as it died. The mini-gun still spun in front of her, ready in case the monster had a friend, but the streets grew an eerie quiet that replaced the ringing with a stale, audible silence. 

“Fucking shit, fuck, fuck, shit, fucking fuck,” she muttered. The mini-gun finally gave way and crashed into the gravel beneath her as her knees buckled, sending her face-forward into the rubble. She heard Garvey’s feet hit the pavement and the frantic calls of Sturges behind him.

“I’m fine, guys,” she assured. In her mind, she was waving her hand at them as a sign of life, but her physical body was unaware of her intentions as it lay limp and crumpled like a rag doll. “Don’t worry, I’m alive. Just a little tired. Just gonna take a little nap here, right on the road. No worries, no worries.”

“Get her off the ground, Sturges, we’ve got to get her inside.”

“I’m on it, boss.”

She felt Sturges’s roughened hands scoop beneath her armpits, hoisting her from her pathetic position into his arms. She vaguely understood that this was the first real human contact she had in so long, but she couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by it. She imagined Nate’s face, scornfully watching her as another man carried her to safety. 

“Thank you,” she said as she was set on a cushion on the lobby’s floor. The Minutemen surrounded her, watching to see if her eyes would shut permanently. “I’m fine, folks. Don’t worry about me.”

“That was some show, ma’am. I’ve been handling a gun as long as I can remember, but I don’t think I would last that long against a Deathclaw.”

“Is _that_ what it’s called? Man. I guess that makes sense, though.”

“Never seen a Deathclaw before?”

“Nah, never had the pleasure,” she intoned with a dreamy smile. Nora was just happy to be alive, even if it meant she might live to see another Satan-Lizard hybrid. The sight of Preston Garvey sat in front of her with a concerned expression on his kind face made her swell with pride, and Sturges posted by the front door made her feel safe. She liked the wastelanders. She liked all the people she’d met— she even liked the raiders, in a weird way. Everyone was plucky and happy to _just be alive_. 

“Once you’re feeling up to it, you ought to come with us. We heard of an old neighborhood close by that would make a good spot for a settlement. Sanctuary Hills. Appropriate name, huh?”

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Garvey?” Marcy questioned from her place against the far wall. “We might be safer holed up in this place.”

“We’ll never know unless we try. Sanctuary might be exactly the kind of place we need.”

“Sanctuary will be good for you,” Nora interrupted, and Garvey turned to her in surprise. “I used to live there. Before the war, that is.”

“The war? What war?”

“ _The_ war. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when I’m not at death’s doorstep, but I think Sanctuary Hills would be a perfect home for the Minutemen.”

She closed her eyes and pictured the little settlement in her mind, but for the first time, she saw it as it was, the wrecked little suburban paradise that sat just below the looming hill of Vault 111. She saw the skeletons of houses and the spindly arms of irradiated trees that grew through the empty windows. She saw the empty beds, the dirty halls, the rusted doorframes. And she saw life in that. She saw Preston Garvey stepping lively down the neighborhood streets at night with his hands in his pockets, whistling a song no one knew the name of. She saw Marcy and Jun huddled together in bed on a cold night, listening to the crickets chirp in the woods outside. 

There was life in Sanctuary Hills. It was hidden in the darkened corners of ruined houses, but it was there, and it was perhaps even more meaningful than before the war.

“Alright then. Everyone rest up. By morning, we’ll move on to Sanctuary Hills.” 

On the afternoon of the next day, she sat cross-legged on the floor of her Sanctuary home, where she once would have kneeled on the sticky plasticky linoleum, scrubbing at grout because the Hawthorne’s were coming over for Sunday brunch the next day, and they would be keenly inspecting the grout. 

Recently, she had been practicing a _train-of-thought_ exercise in which she let her thoughts go wherever they wanted. Most times, she kept a strict adherence to thought-rules. She couldn’t afford to think with too much sentimentality or hope, because the word no longer conformed to such things, but she allowed herself moments of wildness when she felt that her feelings could no longer be restricted to the dusty back corners of her head. 

_My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare. I had to cram so many things to store everything in there._

She wondered where she would be in five years, and for the first time, she seemed to notice that her prescience did not extend to the rest of the year, even. She would just have to wait and see the next morning, and then the next, and the next, until she woke up and knew she would die. 

Assuming she would be alive in five years, would she have wasted away? Turned to chems in her misery, taking hits of jet between grand Nietzschean thoughts about the meaninglessness of life? Would she succumb to the horrors of radiated life, her skin beginning to pool in rough gauntlets down to the tips of her fingers? 

_I do have to admit— being irradiated enough to glow green would look cool as fuck._

_Fuck, fuck. FUCK._

She loved swearing. Even in her head, it felt liberating. Before the bombs fell, she had never once swore aloud, much less for people to hear. The language of the wasteland was beautifully rough, and she loved hearing even the most profane raiders spit vitriol at her, even as she shot back from behind an old Gunner’s barrier. 

“FUCK!” She yelled out loud, with a smile. She wasn’t sure if Codsworth heard her, or if he was appalled at her sudden outburst of foul language, but she didn’t care. He would understand. 

She wondered errantly if he was programmed graciously enough to be able to swear so violently himself. 

_If Codsworth said ‘fuck’, that would make this whole thing worth it, I think._

It had been three weeks since she had pulled herself from that damned vault, and so far, she had to give the Nuclear Apocalypse credit. It had really done a number on good ole Planet Earth, and it was certainly creative in its exploits. 

Two-headed cows? Beautiful, brilliant, exceptional storytelling. Conceptually, it was all very nice. In practice? She thought it could do better. 

Three weeks out of cryogenic storage, and the worst the wasteland had done to her thus far was get a switchblade stuck in her leg, which she in turn stuck into a raider’s leg. She was turning radioactive lemons into radioactive lemonade, and it was spicy in ways that lemonade shouldn’t be, but at least she wasn’t dead. 

“Mum,” Codsworth interrupted her train of thought as he meandered into the living room. He had a few spots of rust on him now, an addition she was sure would infuriate him if she knew whether he was able to see himself in a mirror. 

_He’s not a vampire, he’s a robot. Of course he can see himself in a mirror. Just like he can see me._

“Hi, Codsworth,” she replied. She stood up from the floor and her joints creaked. That was a fun new problem that came with being over 200 years old, she had discovered. Her joints now sounded like the sputtering of an old car engine. She wasn’t built for this apocalypse business. 

“Your friends from Concord have arrived, and their leader requests your presence.”

“Thank you, Codsworth.”

She wiped a stray tear from her eye that she hadn’t been aware of prior and headed towards the door to see her new ragtag group of friends making their way across the bridge to Sanctuary Hills, the Red Rocket Truck Stop looming behind them. 

She hadn’t been _completely_ useless in her three weeks in the wasteland. In fact, Nora was quite proud of herself. She had always wondered if she would survive in one of those tacky zombie movies that ran on weekends on Channel 42— “ _The Commonwealth’s Home for All Things Sci-Fi and Horror!”—_ and now she knew for a fact that she would survive. 

In three weeks, Nora had restored the necessary parts of her old Sanctuary home, given her old robot butler a dusty bowler hat, traveled to Concord, beat the Ever-Loving Shit out of some giant glowing cockroaches, fought a Satanic Lizard, and met a really cool dog. The dog was now sleeping in a little red doghouse she had moved to her front lawn. 

She had always wanted a dog. Having a baby, Nora had once thought, would be a gateway drug to getting a dog. That was Pro #4 on her list of Pros and Cons of baby-having. Now, she could have a dog, totally baby-free. 

_Take that, Nate._

As soon as Preston stood square-shouldered before the first house on the street, a menacing roar of thunder split the sky, and nauseous yellow clouds rolled in over the horizon. Nora wanted to think that it looked like the end of the world, but the apocalypse had already happened. This was just another awful thing she would have to live through.

She stood up and gazed at the sky under the shade of her palm as Garvey approached.

“Radstorm coming,” he mentioned casually. 

“Radstorm?”

“Radiation storm. Bad news for anyone without a gas mask.”

“Radiation storm,” she muttered under her breath. “Of course there are radiation storms. What do people typically do during a radiation storm?”

“Stay inside, if you can. In your case, I would recommend getting a good sleep. You don’t look so good.”

“You sure you don’t need my help?” She asked, praying that the answer was no, but she couldn’t bring herself to go to sleep without at least asking. Damned maternal instincts. 

Preston chuckled, “No, you go ahead to sleep, ma’am. You’ve already done more than we could ask for.”

Nora wondered if she would be able to sleep in her old bed. She hadn’t even tried, opting always for the Hawthorne’s old queen bed, now doubly-stuffed with Bloatfly larvae in the seems. Every time she walked into her old bedroom, she had to walk down the hall, and when she walked down the hall, she had to walk by Shaun’s room. 

The child haunted her in so many ways, and she decided, after breaking out of a high-security vault and killing a Deathclaw in the middle of Concord, perhaps she was more able than she thought. She was going to find that child. Shaun was going to come home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think some of my writing can tend to be a bit of a game of 'guess which line is a David Bowie reference', lol. October feels very slow, doesn't it? September seemed to fly by, but now October seems quite long. I hope you all are having a lovely fall!! :)


	3. WASTELAND CHIC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, folks! Wow, I cannot thank you enough. The kind comments you all have left have made my days brighter, and I will always remember your sweet words. I must admit, this story might feel like it starts slowly, because I dedicated a lot of time at the beginning to characterizing Nora and her initial travels in the wasteland. Fallout 4 was my very first introduction to the Fallout universe, and I wanted to capture some of my own wonder and amusement at experiencing such exciting people and places for the first time. Deacon does make a tiny appearance in this chapter, if you look closely. I have a soft spot for travel tales, and that's what this chapter is-- just a nice little road trip as Nora makes her way to Goodneighbor. I swear that more plot will come along at some point. I sincerely hope you enjoy this chapter, even though it is a lot of filler! Love you all!! <3

_III. WASTELAND CHIC_

200 years in cryogenic storage had not done wonders for her figure, and she assumed that the radiated food of the wasteland was not going to do anything for her either, but at least her butt looked somewhat nice in the vault suit she still wore. She had barely had time to check herself out in the shattered remains of a bathroom mirror before a swarm of Radroaches piled in through the broken window. She cursed and pulled out her baseball bat. 

It was a rusty metal bat, one she’d found in someone’s quondam backyard and wrapped with an old chain-link fence, and it was horrifyingly coated with fluorescent blood, but it was effective, and she had developed a kind of affection for it. She had even started to refer to it as _Honey_. 

She had started her day off right with a delicious meal of roasted roach and a bottle of flat Nuka-Cola. 

_Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! If you want to be a Terror of the Wasteland, you have to eat like a Terror of the Wasteland!_

She longed for a proper bowl of Sugar Bombs, with or without the added Communism and subsequent commentary from her… _late husband._ She would have eaten a raw box of Blamco Mac & Cheese at that point. In fact, the steady crunch of the raw shells might have been a comfort to her. 

But the wasteland was unforgiving, and the spit roast she’d restored behind the Red Rocket Truck Stop would have to suffice. Dogmeat seemed to enjoy a nice roasted roach, at least. When she had set out from Sanctuary Hills, the dog had followed right on her heels, his tongue hanging out and his eyes too big and wide for her to say no. 

And she had to admit that a life on the road didn’t sound half-bad, especially with a pup at her heels, biting the ankles of mole rats and raiders alike. 

_They could’ve made a radio show about me,_ she thought with amusement. _The Lone Wanderer: stalking the wastelands with her trusty sidekick! Or… maybe I’m the sidekick._

Preston Garvey had assured her that she was welcome to stay in Sanctuary, and that she could live on the settlement under the protection of the Minutemen, but as soon as she felt the pang in her heart that told her to find Shaun, she had to refuse the promise of safety. She knew now that she couldn’t settle down until she had found her child. _Her_ child. 

Before, it had always been _the_ child. It could have been any child sleeping in the back room of her house, and it would have unnerved her just the same, but now it was Shaun. It was the tiny little thing that had listened to her ramble endlessly about her troubles and had never once judged her. It was the little human whose small, puffy hands had gripped her hair to pull her closer. 

She still wasn’t a fan of babies in general, but Shaun— Shaun didn’t seem so bad.

Nora hadn’t even known where to start looking for him until the old lady with the drug problem had given her a prophecy. 

_“How did you know where to look for your baby?” “Oh, the old lady with the drug problem gave me a prophecy.”_

She recognized that her methodology was not scientifically viable, but it was something to go on, and the world had already proven to her that it was sufficiently fucked up enough for her to trust an old woman with a drug problem who gave her a prophecy. 

Diamond City. 

Where that was or how she was supposed to get there, she had no idea. All she had was the meager voice of the Diamond City Radio host who stuttered through her pip-boy as she slung her bag over her shoulder and set off on the road past Concord. She quite liked the guy. He had a real genuine way about him— not like the pre-war radio hosts, or the newscasters. Chip Harris from Channel 5 News Hour would have laughed at the Diamond City guy, but Chip Harris from Channel 5 News Hour didn’t survive the nuclear apocalypse, so he wasn’t in a position to criticize anyone. 

“So… someone told me… which, I know is not a great— a great news source,” the man said, his voice pitching wildly like a pre-pubescent boy. “But. Somebody told me that… someone else saw someone… a person… an alive person… coming out of that vault up north. Vault 11? Vault 111? Something like that. Anyway, here’s Billie Holiday.”

She smiled to herself. Perhaps she should have been shocked to hear herself mentioned on the radio, but she reveled in the idea that someone had seen her, had watched her stumble like a newborn deer in the wasteland sunlight, and thought she was news-worthy. 

She had gained a new skill, one possibly more useful in her current situation than her unusual prescience, which was the ability to rob corpses. She didn’t like that she had acquired that skill, nor did she particularly wish to brag about it, but it certainly had helped, as she now wore arm bands, leg guards, and a chest wrap made from sturdy leather. They reeked of someone else’s blood until she had washed them in the creek and let them soak in the sun, though they still didn’t smell particularly _good_. 

Tucked tight in the strap of her chest piece were a few fresh stimpaks, bought from a trader she had met just off the Sanctuary bridge. 

“ _You might need these,”_ he had said jovially, not reacting to the confused expression she gave him. “ _The world isn’t like it used to be.”_

She had watched him walk over the bridge behind her, his bald head bobbing from side to side as he whistled a tune. 

The world _wasn’t_ like it used to be. It was _stronger._

Before the war, the world had been a fragile, cowering thing. Planet Earth was shriveled like a frightened child in the corner as its children raged on, sewing the ground with their vile progress. She saw the world in the vibrant colors of her neighborhood— the powdery blues of her house, the bright yellow cardigan she wore over her finely-pressed green linen dress. Every house in Sanctuary was painted bright. There was no disguising the neighborhood, there was no attempt at maintaining the natural appearance of the creek below. The world belonged to the humans. 

Now, she saw the world in the creeping roots that shattered the roadways, spindling outwards towards the woods. Sanctuary Hills was now hidden away by the gangly trees that sheltered its broken thatched roofs. The creek had branched into two tributaries which ran parallel to the little neighborhood. She felt rejuvenated by it, felt that if the earth could experience such a grand rebirth, she could too.

The world wasn’t like it used to be, and neither was she. 

She was _thriving._

Her pip-boy chirped and crackled as she wandered closer to the city that had been looming in the distance. She wasn’t quite sure where she was— her map was no good for determining places she had never been, and she had never quite been good with directions. 

A man’s voice sputtered through the tiny speaker, “ _Calling all Silver Shroud fans! Calling all Silver Shroud fans!”_ And she laughed at the excited announcement. Silver Shroud fans? In this day and age? It seemed impossible, but obviously, there was someone out there who held tight to such pre-war luxuries. 

_When evil walks the streets of Boston, one man lurks in the shadows…_

The croon of the silver-throated narrator played perfectly in her head as if she had just heard it that very morning. Nate hadn’t liked the Shroud— something about the dangers of vigilante justice— but she had listened to it, almost out of spite. She imagined the Silver Shroud breaking through their paneled front windows, spilling silvery glass all over the pristine living room carpet, and pointing one long, gloved finger towards Nate, saying, “ _Stop being a dick to your wife, you fiend!”_

“ _Come to the Memory Den in Goodneighbor!”_

Nora didn’t know what a memory den was, and she didn’t know where Goodneighbor was, but it all sounded quite nice. 

“Any place called _Goodneighbor_ has to be good news, right?” She asked Dogmeat. He let out a sharp _ruff_ in response, and she took that as a yes. “Goodneighbor. Next stop, Goodneighbor.”

She liked the sound of it on her tongue, so she said it aloud a few more times. It was certainly more fascinating than _Sanctuary Hills_ or _Westing Estate_ or any of the other quaint little pre-war neighborhoods she had visited in her previous life _._ Goodneighbor was a city that advertised its greatest assets, and she could picture it in her mind. A plucky little town full of kind faces, good folks sweeping the streets and helping the needy. 

She never would have expected what she found in Goodneighbor, nor the batshit insanity that now roamed the streets of Boston, lurking in the shadows of abandoned buildings and fronting in the middle of the road brandishing pistols. The Silver Shroud was nowhere to be seen, but there was evil, walking the streets of Boston, just like the narrator said. 

Nora ducked as the _thing_ swiped a huge green arm above her head, nearly knocking it right off her neck like a golfball from a tee. The lumbering mass of human-like features had spotted her creeping down a side-street and decided that it was going to, presumably, eat her. She had no idea of its intentions, aside from violently smashing her to bits, as the thing repeatedly warned her. 

“SMASH YOUR BRAINS!” It screamed as it lunged for her head once again. She pulled the 10mm from her waistband and backed away, trying to assert some distance before the thing could smack her again. It had already landed one hit to her shoulder, and the stinging was getting worse by the second. 

She tried to fire a round of shots into the thing’s chest, but the 10mm she had scavenged from the bowels of Vault 111 was clicky and rusted, only allowing her about a 50% chance of producing a bullet. Luckily for her, she also had a 50% chance of living through the day. 

The Big Green Bastard wouldn’t kill her, but she didn’t like the idea of being maimed, either, and she was almost sure that something in her body was already broken. 

When she finally produced a shot, the piercing _bang_ rang out through the street, and she suddenly worried that the sound would alert other enemies to her presence in the alleyway. 

_What if a thousand more of these Big Green Bastards come pouring in, all of them trying to SMASH MY BRAINS?_

She didn’t have time to fully assess the concern, as a fat splintering board was now soaring towards her skull at an alarming rate. She hunched over into a ball and, for lack of a better term, _rolled_ out of the way. She had never once heard of the Silver Shroud doing something _that_ asinine to escape an attacker. The Silver Shroud would have pulled out his trusty machine gun and mowed the Green Bastards down. 

But, then again, the Silver Shroud did not have to deal with Big Green Bastards.

With a heaving grunt, Nora planted a hit on the side of the thing’s head with Honey, and it made a splattering thwacking sound. Green skin and horrifically human red guts spattered the alley’s brick wall behind where the thing now lay unmoving. 

Nora had learned not to assume that anything unmoving was dead. Even though the thing’s skull was split wide open with a cracking cavern growing on its right side, she couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t shove the other half of its skull back into place with one huge, meaty hand and continue thrusting towards her.

“Holy shit, Dogmeat,” she whispered to the pup who now lay exhausted by her feet. Despite her better judgement, she crossed her legs beneath her and sat on the dusty ground, absentmindedly scratching the space between his ears.“You ever seen one of those things? That’s not fun. That’s not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.”

Dogmeat whined and rested his head down onto his crossed paws. Nora hummed in affirmation. The two would have to find Goodneighbor by night, because if they didn’t, she was positive that she wouldn’t wake up the next morning. Her shoulder burned awfully now that she was resting. The adrenaline of the fight had kept her pain receptors muted, but now they flared violently enough to blur her vision. As much as she didn’t want to stand, she knew she had to move on. 

Her legs creaked as she stood, tugging Dogmeat by the neat red bandana she had tied around his neck, signaling that it was time to go. He whined but complied, his eyes watching the waning sun burn blood orange across the Boston skyline as if he too knew what it meant. 

Goodneighbor was close, she was sure of it. She could see in the distance a flickering neon sign that flashed a dazed purple over the top of a brick wall. 

Goodneighbor. The Memory Den. The Silver Shroud. 

She repeated the mantra over and over until it became her only lingering thought, like Dorothy stumbling through the woods, arm in arm with her ragtag group of friends. _Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh My!_

Goodneighbor. The Memory Den. The Silver Shroud.

Goodneighbor. The Memory Den. The Silver Shroud. 

Goodneighbor. 

The Memory Den. 

The Silver Shroud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, I wonder if people can tell when they read my fiction writing that I am so used to writing nonfiction. I am a historian during the day, so I am so used to writing about historical events that I sometimes forget how much fun it is to write fiction.   
> I forgot to do this for the second chapter, but here are a few songs that I thought of as I wrote and edited this chapter:  
> Collapsible Lung//Relient K  
> Oh My God//Kaiser Chiefs  
> Younger//The Mountain Goats


	4. MURDER: THOUGHTS?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Y'all are so sweet, leaving me little comments and kudos. Thank you so much! I truly cannot thank you enough! We have arrived in Goodneighbor, which means it's time to meet some friendly faces and learn about some underground organizations. There is a bit of sadness at the end of the chapter, but fear not! Things will get better, they always do! This chapter and its title are based on that feeling I think we all felt when we first entered Goodneighbor: "I probably shouldn't be happy that the mayor killed a guy right in front of me, but he does seem like a really cool guy." I hope you enjoy!! Love you all!! <3

_IV. MURDER: THOUGHTS?_

She knew she was supposed to be appalled, but she wasn’t. Nora was enamored. The action and its implications were not lost on her, but she could not help her unorthodox glee at the fact that this man, this perfect stranger, had killed a man in cold blood in the street in front of her. 

Her life in Sanctuary was so planned, so thoroughly monitored and expertly executed, that she had no sense of separation between herself and the people around her. Her life and the lives they lived were astoundingly similar, from waking up, to going to bed at night. Even their clothes were from the same stores, made from the same reels of cloth. Nora couldn’t count the number of times she had wandered out to the front porch to notice Mrs. Johnson wearing the exact same dress as she watched her children play in the grass. 

She was no one, she was everyone. 

This man saw something in her that he wanted to protect. The unsavory motives of the now dead man were a factor in his sudden death, but so was Nora herself. Her innocence and value were assumed upon her arrival. These were favors she had never been allowed before. She had left an impression on someone, even within a few seconds, and he had determined her to be worthy of his protection.

Perhaps it was her old romantic mind that led Nora to this thinking, but she felt that her eyes were moony and vacant nearly the whole time he was sauntering towards her. 

“You okay, kid? You’ve got that far-off look in your eyes,” he spoke, voice low and gravely. This was the first moment she realized that the man she was talking to wasn’t exactly human. Well, he might have been human, but not the kind of human they’d had before the war. “You on drugs?”

“Not that I know of,” Nora replied, her demeanor shifting drastically to suit the charm that seemed to ooze from the roughed bellows of his wrinkled skin. “Are you?”

“Allegedly, but that’s neither here nor there. Mayor Hancock. Welcome to Goodneighbor.”

“Much obliged, Mr. Mayor. Is this a skit you put on every time someone new walks through the door?”

He chuckled, much to her relief. She noted with a wary eye that a tall woman lingered at the doorway of the building Hancock had come from, a woman with leery, sharp eyes and an even sharper knife tucked against her thigh. 

_That’s not very… neighborly._

“No, but you’ve certainly given me something to think about. Look, you seem cool, so let me know if you need anything, okay? As long as you’re not hurting anybody, you’re good to stay. Goodneighbor is of the people, for the people. You feel me?”

“I feel you,” she affirmed with a nod of her head. For the millionth time since she had met someone new in the wasteland, she felt like she couldn’t help but stare. His eyes were pitch black, or at least they looked to be from where she was standing. 

_That’s so fucking cool. That’s so fucking cool, but I don’t want to say anything about it, because I don’t want to be rude. Black eyes? That’s so fucking cool_.

“Good,” he replied with a furrow of his non-existent eyebrows. “You never seen a ghoul before?”

_Shit. Shit. Shit._

“Honestly, no. I was just thinking that having black eyes is pretty fucking cool, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Shit, I don’t mind. Trying to make me blush, get on the Mayor’s good side? At least you’re honest. What kind of settlement have you been living in to avoid ghouls this long?”

“Vault 111.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hancock intoned. He stuck his hands deep into his pockets and fished out a cigarette, politely offering her a drag before lighting it for himself. He eyed her slowly. “Listen, sister, you’re looking a little worse for wear. What say we get you down to Dr. Amari at the Memory Den?”

Her heart leapt. “The Memory Den?”

That was step two. Goodneighbor, The Memory Den, The Silver Shroud. If she could find the Memory Den, she could win them all. 

“What did you run into, kid? A Super Mutant?”

“What the fuck is a Super Mutant?”

He laughed as she ran to fall in step with his long strides. For a man of about 5’8”, he had the stature of a man twice his size. He moved lithely through the little town with his red frock coat falling languid behind him. 

She liked Hancock, of that she was very sure. Yes, he _was_ incredibly terrifying, but he was also undeniably charming enough to make her forget the terror— perhaps that should have terrified her more, but it didn’t. He was a politician, after all, and instead of grandstanding in the senate and making passive-aggressive news appearances like pre-war politicians, he just flashed his knife and a winning smile, and that took care of all his problems. 

_It might not be better, but it also might not be worse. It’s just… a different way of doing things._

As the bright red glow of the Memory Den came closer into view, so did a broader perspective on the city. Junkies sat idling by the bricked walls, drifters strolled about with shifting eyes, security guards wielded hefty machine guns. No one without a weapon. No one without a desperate look in their eyes.

She looked over her shoulder to make sure that Dogmeat was still trotting happily behind her, and his big brown eyes looked into hers as if to say, _“I don’t think this place should be called ‘Goodneighbor’.”_

She nearly agreed out loud before remembering that she was now in a city, where people milled about the streets and almost certainly would not take well to her conversing openly with a dog.

Goodneighbor was not what she had expected, to say the least, but it was a place to rest her head, and at least the mayor was interested in her wellbeing. She chuckled at the irony of the name, earning a sly glance from Hancock as pointed her to the Memory Den. 

“Dr. Amari will take good care of you. Don’t let Kent rope you into anything… weird.”

But she did let Kent rope her into something weird. She agreed to it without a second thought. Kent Connolly, also a ghoul, stared into her soul with longing yellow eyes and turned her brain to mush. Logically, she knew that venturing out to steal a costume from a run-down comic book store was suicide, but he tilted his head and raised his brow and gazed at her like a needy child, and she agreed instantly.

_Sure, Kent. I’ll haul my ass into the pits of hell to get you your Halloween costume. You just say the word, I’ll fisticuff with the Devil._

The streets of Goodneighbor seemed to become even seedier as the sun fell further below the city’s walls. The cover of night shadowed the doings of criminals— though she could hardly bring herself to call them _criminals._ There was no law, especially in Goodneighbor. Hancock loomed above the city, watching in a drugged haze from his balcony, and his bodyguard lingered in doorways with her knives gleaming in the waning light. Goodneighbor turned its head to petty crime, even murder. 

That was the way of the wasteland. There was no moral compass here. There couldn’t be. 

Nora dragged her weary feet out of the Memory Den, sneaking her way towards the hotel at the city’s edge, but in her weariness, she brushed shoulders with a drifter.

“Sorry,” she rushed, turning to the man with fear in her eyes. He simply chuckled, flicking the bridge of his sunglasses upward on his nose. 

“No worries, buddy. Watch yourself out there, got it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Good night.”

“And, uh, if you’re ever looking for some excitement in your life—“ he thrust his hand forward, and she lurched, thinking it to be a knife, but it wasn’t. The little thing he extended to her was something she thought she would never see again.

A little orange and white holotape with black ink writing scrawled across the top band of it. She didn’t know how to work the holotape player on her pip-boy, but she would spend the whole night figuring it out, trying to prod the tape into every opening she could find. 

She had holed up in the Hotel Rexford for the night in a little room at the very edge of the building. There was a single window facing outwards towards Boston, but she kept the tattered brown curtains shut tight. She didn’t want to look out through the cracked glass to watch Super Mutants wandering around Boston Commons at night, slabs of broken swan boats strapped to their muscly backs. 

Instead, she sat huddled in the calming green light of her pip-boy, poking through files and data until she finally clicked open the tape compartment. She pressed the tape into place, and a message flickered across the screen in bright neon lettering.

INSERTED: JOIN THE RAILROAD. PLAY?

Oh, good. She was being asked to join a cult, she thought. The Railroad didn’t sound particularly menacing, but neither had “Vault-Tec” or “Museum of Liberty”, and both of those things had tried their damndest to wipe her off the face of the tortured earth. 

In her mind, she sketched out a spot in her schedule for crying after she had finished her Railroad Indoctrination. In a post-nuclear world where time itself seemed to have been blown to bits, it was important for her to maintain a somewhat tidy schedule, and with the advent of her troubled arrival in Goodneighbor, it was high time she allowed herself to weep for a bit.

Her eyes were already feeling blurry, but she pushed it off as a woman’s voice filtered through the pip-boy’s speaker. The voice was smooth, comforting. She would have been a fantastic newscaster pre-war— maybe a meteorologist. Instead, the soothing voice begged the Commonwealth to action. A sort of post-war Uncle Sam, Nora thought to herself with a laugh. _The Railroad needs YOU!_

The message rambled passionately about _synths_ and the _Institute_ , and claims of abuse and slavery. Though Nora had no idea what a _synth_ was, or where the _Institute_ was, she gathered that neither entity was incredibly popular amongst the people of the Commonwealth.

As the tape ended, her lungs gave way to a heaving sob that caused her to fall to her side on the rickety bed. She had not even the willpower to tuck the blanket over top of her as her eyes fluttered wildly over her tear-dripped lashes and her nose clogged. 

The wasteland had already taken a great emotional toll on her, and though she could still look in a shattered mirror to see herself reflected in pre-war conditions, she had immanently changed. She was a different person now, no longer the Nora that cooked and cleaned and snarked in private to herself and to a child in a pristine baby blue crib. She was Nora, Vault Dweller, pre-war relic, who had killed both animals and people to make her way into a town where she felt nothing but a strange sense of pride as she had watched the mayor murder a man in the street before her.

Where was her dignity? Where were her morals?

Was she any better than a raider? Was the death she dispensed somehow more justified than mindless killing?

Nora felt her moral backbone melt under such burning questions. She hadn’t signed a moral contract upon entering Sanctuary Hills, but the rigid standard of living ran deep through the tiny neighborhood. They went to church on Sundays, they waved to their neighbors across the road, they raised their children to be loving wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers, and the cycle never ended as long as Sanctuary Hills stood bright and clear in its cozy northern corner of the Commonwealth. 

Her tears pooled beneath her cheek on the bed, and she wondered errantly if she would have to pay extra for the tear stains on the sheets. Perhaps the concierge would take pity on her, as she was undoubtedly suffering from an acute mental breakdown. 

For all the good she saw in the wasteland and its people, she could not see its good in herself. She could not see herself transformed in the bending glow of the post-nuclear world. For the first time, she felt a pang in her heart at the thought of Sanctuary Hills. She wanted the structure back, the blistering rigidity. She wanted to wring her hands dry worrying about what she would make for dinner or break her back scrubbing minuscule imperfections in the kitchen grout. 

She wanted Nate to make passing comments about the _Damn Commies_ and send her on mindless tasks about the house and at the grocery store. She wanted to wake up in the middle of the night with a child screaming bloody murder in the next room. 

She would take it all back, right then and there. She would stop complaining about every little thing she had found to complain about before the war, if it meant that she could just shut her brain up for a while. That was the worst part of it— whether it was before the war or after, whether she was in the kitchen or standing triumphant over a pile of bloody corpses, her brain was the same, and it was always whispering in her ear that she was not fit for any environment. 

She had failed as a wife and mother before the war, and now she was a murdering, thieving monster after it. Nowhere she went was safe for her. No one she met had convinced her otherwise. 

All the saccharine words of Preston Garvey hadn’t satiated her vicious need to be considered a good person. All the drugged meanderings of Mama Murphy hadn’t convinced her of any destiny other than the only one she could foresee in that moment. 

Nora Woodring was dead and cold, but she had plucked herself from the grave— and for what? 

The wasteland was not kind, even to those who were. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October is still passing by very slowly, I think, but the oncoming cold is making it much easier to endure. I don't work well in the heat! I hope you all get to snuggle up with a blanket and a hot cup of coffee/tea/hot chocolate, perhaps cuddle with a soft pet, and enjoy some time to yourself; you deserve some rest. Here are a couple songs that I listened to as I wrote and edited this chapter:  
> From Me, the Moon//Lav  
> Collapsible Lung//Relient K (again! I think this song fits Nora very well)


	5. CANNED FASCISM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends! Thank you all once again for your support for this story. This is yet another chapter where Nora runs into some new people in the wasteland, and learns about the fascinating new creatures that roam around. Let it be known that I do, in fact, love Paladin Danse; however, since this will be a Railroad story, I have to shame the Brotherhood a bit. Fun fact: I actually have a graduate advisor whose last name is Maxson, and I have, at least once, referred to him as 'Elder Maxson' by accident. Luckily, he didn't even notice. I hope you all enjoy this chapter, and you can rest assured that next chapter will actually be a change of pace from the travel tales. Love you all!! <3

_V. CANNED FASCISM_

Nora had not intended to become the wasteland’s only hope, but she had picked up the frustrating habit of picking up distress signals on her pip-boy, and once she had heard them, she couldn’t turn it down. 

She had spent two weeks in Goodneighbor, gearing up for a journey to Hubris Comics to find a Halloween costume that, by now, was likely eaten up by Radroaches. However, she was now the Vice President of the Goodneighbor chapter of the Silver Shroud Fan Club, and it was her sworn duty to follow Kent’s orders to the letter. Even if he hadn’t offered her the second-in-command position, she still would have done it. 

But as the sun began to push further and further beyond the ruined skyline and Dogmeat’s tired whimpers turned into long, pitiful whines, she realized with a sinking feeling that she was horribly lost. No one had bothered to tell her where Hubris Comics was, and of course, she had forgotten entirely to ask, so now she wandered the lonely streets in hopes that she would stumble across it. 

That’s when she found her newest project— the Cambridge Police Station. Her pip-boy buzzed, almost in excitement, at the new signal that stuttered through the tinny speaker, crowded with static in the thickening night air. A woman with a kind voice was asking for help at the Cambridge Police Station, and fresh with the emotions of her recent mental breakdown, Nora was compelled to dispense justice as soon as she could. Perhaps, she thought, it would pay off her newfound sins. 

_If I do find Shaun… I want him to be proud of his mother._

“I know you’re tired, boy,” she whispered into Dogmeat’s flattening ears. She soft fur of his neck was warm under his red bandana, and she scratched him there for a moment as the two sat silently in the dead grass. “If we can make it to the Cambridge Police Station, we’ll have a place to stay for the night. Okay?”

His big brown eyes seemed to see right through her, and he gave her cheek a sly lick before bounding to his feet once more in the pursuit of adventure. 

“I swear you can understand me sometimes. Do you speak English, Dogmeat?”

He barked in response. 

_I would say that this confirms that I’ve gone crazy, but would it be so strange to find a talking dog in the wasteland? Would that be the wackiest thing to happen at this point?_

Her pace quickened as she heard shouting in the distance, and the quick spirts of energy blasts that no doubt accompanied a firefight. The Cambridge Police Station was surrounded by ghouls, all being mowed down by a menacing metal figure on the steps.

“Hey, I’m here to help!” She shouted to a ghoul, who turned her with an expression of pure nothingness, and reached its spindly ruined arms towards her face with a grunt. “Woah, hey, I’m friendly! You know Hancock?”

_Is it racist to assume that all ghouls know each other? Maybe they have a Ghoul Support Group?_

“Watch yourself, civilian, these are ferals,” called the mechanical voice of the tin man, his silhouette overcome by what she now recognized as a fully-restored suit of power armor. The sight sent chills down her spine.

She vaguely remembered Garvey mentioning ferals— “ _best to kill them before they kill you.”_ So, she raised her weapon, and fired. Her moral dilemma dissipated when she observed these ghouls ripping at two other humans lingering by the station’s entrance. One was already wounded, and the other held a single hand aloft with a pipe pistol, picking off any ramblers who dared to come close.

A yellow-eyed ghoul with a plastic knife hanging limply from a gash in his leg lunged for the power armor from behind, nearly ripping the helmet from his head before Nora put a shotgun shell in its head. A grotesque swirl of blood and brains spattered across the crisp metal.

“Thank you for your assistance, civilian,” the man said as he wrenched the helmet from his head and looked in proper disgust at the bodies lying in the courtyard. “How did you find us?”

Nora didn’t speak, only tapped the screen of her pip-boy and grimaced as a staunch ache filled her right arm.

The man was handsome, in a classic sort of way. Had he lived in Sanctuary, Natalie Hawthorne would have been all over him, to the complete ignorance of her husband. Tall, neat beard, heavy brow— he looked the part of a soldier, even without the hulking armor.

“How did you get a hold of a pre-war relic like that?” She inquired.

“I could ask you the same, ma’am.”

His tone begged to be mocked. She wanted to repeat his line in a squeaky voice, wrenching her face into an awful expression, but that would have been childish. She would do it in private, where no one would judge her— or shoot her, for that matter.

“I _am_ a pre-war relic. Freshly crawled out of a cryogenic vault facility.”

“Damn. I suppose that explains your bargaining with the ferals.”

“Hmm.”

“I appreciate your honesty, civilian. And in return, I’ll tell you that this police station is under the authority of the Brotherhood of Steel. We haven’t been received with open arms since our arrival in the Commonwealth, so we are keeping our operations quiet for the time being.”

“Noted,” she returned concisely. Something about the man was off-putting, and if there was one thing she trusted with her life, it was her basic instinct. If her gut was telling her that this man was a jackass in a tin can, then she believed that. She _manifested_ that.

“With your fighting capabilities, I wonder if you might make a promising addition to the Brotherhood,” he remarked, to the chagrin of his wounded comrade.

“We don’t know her Danse,” the soldier called from his slump beside the building. Clean-cut, beady eyes. “She tried to make friends with the ferals, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s enough, Rhys. The Brotherhood is always looking for capable soldiers. She can be taught our values.”

“You don’t know me, _Danse,”_ Nora parroted, and Dance raised his brow. “I don’t know what your _values_ are, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to join the military just yet. Had enough of that pre-war.”

“I would hope that you’ll reconsider, civilian. The Brotherhood of Steel is a powerful ally. I’m sure you’ve found that the Commonwealth is not a safe place for someone like you.”

_I would hope that you’ll reconsider, civilian,_ her mind nagged.

“Someone like me? Someone who just shot a ghoul midair before it could rip your head from your neck? Cool. Thanks for the offer. Glad I was able to help, but I think it’s time I head off on my own again.”

She had nearly forgotten her promise to Dogmeat that the two would bunker down in the station for the night once they had found it, but her pride was willing her to walk away. She could find somewhere, surely. There were other beds to be made, and in places where she didn’t have to associate with men in metal suits who called her _civilian._

_Civilian._ There was an acrid taste in her mouth that accompanied that word. Her mind suddenly fluttered with images of soldiers standing by the doors of shopping malls and grocery stores alike, greeting her in their metallic voices. Nowhere was safe from the protection of the US Army. She had stared down the barrel of a mini-gun hundreds of times, simply by strolling through the glossy front doors of a Fallon’s Department Store. 

Preston Garvey had called her _civilian_ once, but it was different. It was a promise of safety and the expectation that she did not have to do anything but exist to merit his protection. The way Danse said it was forceful. He was going to protect her, whether she liked it or not, and he would do it by force if he had to. 

“At least stay for the night, ma’am. It’s getting late,” chimed another voice— the woman who had sent the distress signal. She sat kneeling by the injured man, but while his face was twisted with pain and what Nora recognized as pure grouchiness, her features were soft and comforting. Danse nodded and gestured towards the station.

“Alright. Thank you for your hospitality,” she accepted stiffly. Dogmeat grunted as if to let her know exactly how he felt about her so flippantly rejecting a soft bed for the night. 

Later that night, she sat fiddling with the knobs on her pip-boy in a sleeping bag by the wall of the station, watching Danse out of the corner of her eye as he moved in and out of the lobby area, transporting supplies to the broken down front desk. Perhaps, she thought, she had been a bit too harsh on him. 

“Danse, I’m sorry if I came off a little… grouchy. I’m just not used to wasteland hospitality,” she muttered as she folded her arms over the front desk, leaning her head into her hands. “Thank you for letting me stay here for the night.”

“Of course. You came to our rescue when we needed help, and The Brotherhood is happy to repay in kind, ma’am.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what are the Brotherhood’s _values_ that you mentioned earlier?”

He stiffened, but not uncomfortably. It was as if he were a Tour Guide Protectron, and a tourist had just asked him to recite the history of the Boston Commons. There was a reverence to his speech that made her wonder if the Brotherhood was some new-age religion. 

“Under the guidance of Elder Maxson, the Brotherhood strives to rid the Commonwealth of dangerous influences. The Institute’s synths are vile creations, and it is our mission to destroy the Institute and its byproducts.”

“So what is a _synth?_ ”

“A synth is a robot, so closely disguised as a human that they can infiltrate families and take over entire settlements. The Institute is set on destroying the good people of the Commonwealth by replacing civilians with synth replicas until the entire Commonwealth is under Institute control.”

“Hmm.”

“The Commonwealth is overrun by synths and ferals. The Brotherhood is going to change that.”

“What’s the difference between a feral ghoul and a regular one?”

“In my mind, there is no difference. The ghouls that walk and talk like they’re human are ticking time bombs. They’ll turn feral one day, no exceptions.”

“Hmm.”

She thought this over as she returned to her sleeping bag. Dogmeat now lay with his ears flattened down against his head, his chest gently rising and falling with the ease of sleep. Just looking at him gave her a rush of warmth in her chest, but even as she was comforted by her companion’s relaxation, she pondered Danse’s doctrines.

If synths were so bad, why was the Railroad set on saving them? If ghouls were so bad, why had Hancock and Kent been so nice to her? Daisy had given her a discount on stimpaks just for being new in town. But the ghouls outside of Cambridge were violent. They reeked of radiation poisoning and burning flesh. Their yellow eyes were wild and piercing, and they had reached their curved hands towards Nora’s face with no second thought. Was that what Hancock would be like one day? Would Nora one day waltz into the Memory Den, Silver Shroud costume in hand, to find Kent huddled in the corner, picking at Irma’s dead flesh?

She pushed the image out of her mind. Kent was good and kind and welcoming. He was not feral. Maybe one day he would be, but until he was, Nora saw no need to put a bullet between his eyes. 

The jury was still out on the synths, though. The holotape she’d received from the man in Goodneighbor was still sitting in the top port of her pip-boy. She had listened to it once or twice more before leaving the Rexford, hoping that she could make some sense out of it. 

_Follow the Freedom Trail._

That was the one phrase she felt she could understand. The old winding path had been around before the war— she had, in fact, half-heartedly meandered the bricked red line on the sidewalk for a few minutes behind a tour group while Nate had caught up with a high school friend in the Commons. 

_Sorry, Kent. The Silver Shroud won’t be arriving in Goodneighbor until I’ve figured out what the fuck a synth is._

She felt a surge of moral vindication in her chest as she labored to keep her eyes open. Sleep was overwhelming her, and quickly. She now had a fight to settle. She had a dilemma, one which would no doubt reveal some underlying moral standard. If she picked the right side, she could feel better about herself. 

And the one way to find out was to follow the Freedom Trail. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to make some sugar cookies last night with bat and pumpkin cookie cutters, but they did not hold their shapes while baking and ended up just looking like blobs. They were still fun to decorate, though, and they still tasted good. You should bake yourself some cookies soon-- you deserve it! :)


	6. PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I hope everyone is doing well, especially all of the students having to deal with online classes this semester. We've crossed the midterm point of the semester, and now it's time for me to start writing all of my long research papers. Writing and publishing this story has been a wonderful way for me to relax and take my mind off of my school-related stress. I hope you all are enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

_VI. PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE_

Deacon was up to something. Desdemona knew this, and he knew that she knew this, but he also knew that she didn’t know what he knew. He knew _exactly_ what he was up to, and he was the only one who needed to know.

She eyed him openly as he strolled through the main hub of Railroad HQ, and he simply nodded his head at her with a concise greeting. He was, after all, the Railroad’s _best_ spy, and Desdemona should have learned to trust him by now. 

“I trust you, Deacon,” she would say in her measured tone, taking a long drag from a cigarette. “ _Barely._ ”

And that was all the confirmation he needed. She didn’t even have to trust him at all, as long as she let him do what he needed to do on his own time. When he was on the clock, he was property of the Railroad, on the job and ready for action. On his own time, he was— well, he was no one. He was anyone. 

He had always had a fascination with pre-war widgets, especially the kind that still barely worked after several hundred years of nuclear apocalypse. He had once discovered a Giddyup Buttercup, near pristine except for a missing hoof on its back leg, that creaked wretchedly as it walked. It was horrifying and fascinating all at once. 

He had made a comprehensive guide in his mind to the vaults of the Commonwealth, and he fully intended to explore every one of them he could get into. It had turned out to be mostly fruitless— Vault-Tec sealed their hefty gear-shaped doors tightly, and those which had already been cracked open were infested with folks who were not so personable. He had managed a brief tour of Vault 81, meriting a jumpsuit for himself and a limited-edition Grognak before security told him that he had overstayed his welcome. 95 and 75 were overrun by Gunners, 114 was in the hands of the Mafia, and 111 was… _inaccessible._ That was the most frustrating of all of them. 

Nestled into a hillside looming just above the sleepy town of Sanctuary Hills, Vault 111 had a functioning elevator and only a couple of Radroaches to fend off. The only problem was that he couldn’t get past the front door. It was sealed tight, and the only way to open it was from the inside. He would have to wait until one of the old inhabitants reanimated and snagged a spare pip-boy. 

He had been glaring at it from someone’s quondam back porch when the elevator had emitted a loud buzzing accompanied by a blaring siren and a flashing red light. He chalked it up to faulty wiring at first, but soon enough, the elevator resurfaced with a single figure illuminated by the pale, cloudy light of the morning fog. 

At first, he thought the figure to be an animal. Its back was hunched awfully at a seemingly inhuman angle, and its limbs bent awkwardly at the joints. He soon noted with interest that it was a woman, crouched in what seemed to be a position of pure agony. Her head was tucked to her chest with her chin resting squarely below her collarbone as if she couldn’t bear to hold it up on her own. She was worryingly thin. Her body was compact and stiff.

Just as he began wondering if he should rush to her aid, she stood up and faced the ruined skyline with her shoulders set straight and her feet planted so firmly he might have thought she had turned into a statue. Her eyes scanned the horizon. She clenched her fists into tight balls, impressing her nails into the soft skin of her palms, her knuckles blanched. Her chest heaved once, twice— and she let out a deafening shriek, wild and heartbreaking. 

Several pigeons took fright and scattered into the skeletal trees. The figure brushed her hands off on the legs of her jumpsuit and continued on her way as though nothing had happened. 

He wouldn’t confront her, yet. But he would watch her. Perhaps she was a bit too unhinged for Railroad purposes, but perhaps a bit of _unhinged_ was exactly what they needed. After the Switchboard disaster, the Railroad had nearly crashed and burned, and now they were confined to a dusty crypt with nowhere near the forces they had mere weeks ago. 

“How’s your little project going, Deeks?” Glory inquired in the midst of a game of checkers. Tom had just gained a king on her. “Are you still following a lead?”

“That’s for me to know, and you to _wish_ you knew,” he returned coolly. He was becoming increasingly proud about his little hobby. After all, she had smashed a Super Mutant’s head in with little trouble. Her run-in with the Brotherhood had troubled him, but she had stuck her pointer finger right into Danse’s broad metal chest piece and went on her way. 

He had almost given his position away that night, laughing to himself behind the Cambridge Police Station’s western wall. 

“C’mon, Dee. You can tell us _something,”_ Tom begged. Deacon found it hard to resist Tom, especially because helping Tom meant annoying Carrington, and that was a victory in itself. 

“Well, Tom, I’ve been looking into a potential ally.”

“You asshole, that’s nothing. Tell us more.”

He thought about regaling the time he had watched the vault dweller strap on a leather chest piece in five seconds flat before turning on heel with a pipe pistol in each hand and taking out two raiders at once. They would have called that exaggeration, the _Deacon flair_ he added to every tall tale he told, but it wasn’t. That was the most impressive part of the whole deal. He didn’t have to exaggerate one bit about her, not one detail.

He could have told them about the day she barged into Covenant, declared that she had a “bad feeling” about the whole place, and decided on the spot to shut it down. In a few days time, Covenant was nothing but an empty settlement with a lemonade-hocking robot and a cat. Stockton hardly had time to miss his daughter before she was back safe and sound in Bunker Hill. 

“Slaughtered a Deathclaw in the middle of Concord with a half-stocked mini-gun and a baseball bat.”

“You’re fucking with us.”

“You told us that you did the same thing, Deeks. Can’t reuse the same lie and expect us to believe it.”

“No, this time it’s true,” he insisted. “I didn’t see it, but I got word from a buddy of mine who works with the Minutemen. He saw the whole thing.”

Glory and Tom both muttered their dissent, keeping their eyes on the checker board. Glory double-jumped Tom, but Tom was fast encroaching on her territory. 

“Glory, don’t you have a computer for a brain? I thought you’d be better at this.”

“Fuck you, Deacon. It might come as a surprise, but no one in the Institute thought it necessary to program a _Checkers Variable_ into my system.”

Deacon was proud of his Railroad friends. He felt the horrifying settling of warmth over his chest that came with the prospect of close friendship, and he ignored it in favor of simply enjoying their current company. He couldn’t afford close friendship. In his line of work, he had to recognize that Tom was sitting there, playing checkers with Glory in his tin-foil hat, but that he might not be there tomorrow. 

Everyone was just passing through. No one lived in Railroad HQ, just took up space on a mattress. He couldn’t even bear to get attached to himself. 

_Avenge the past, don’t even consider the option of a future._

He wondered about the vault dweller. He wondered about her emotional state. He thought about the blood-curdling scream she had released on top of the vault’s industrial elevator door, and then how she had washed her hands of it and walked away. In every situation he had witnessed, she had a peculiar brand of vulnerability that made his stomach churn. 

He had seen raiders tear vault dwellers limb from limb just by virtue of the blue and yellow jumpsuit, but she had never once denied her status. She had never once filtered her words or minced her meaning just to appease someone. 

Hell, she had made comments on Hancock’s appearance right off the bat and thought nothing of it. 

There was a power to her innocence and authority in her honesty. That was troubling. 

“Gossiping on company time, are we?” 

Deacon looked up to find Desdemona looming over their conversation. Her brow was raised at him specifically, though he wasn’t the one _playing checkers_ during work hours. 

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I gossip on company time.”

“Wait, you’re making money, Deeks?” Tom squeaked, incensed at the idea. As he turned to express his discontent, Glory subtly made an illegal checkers move. “And here I was thinking noodle bowls was an acceptable form of payment.”

“No one is getting paid, Tom,” Des affirmed. “ _Especially_ not Deacon. Though, I might be willing to reward him if he does a big favor for me.”

“What’s that, boss?”

“Follow me.”

Desdemona led him through the hub into PAM’s office, where she stood stiffly reciting data points to herself aloud. She stuttered over a statistic before turning to greet them. 

“Agents Deacon and Desdemona. How may I be of service?”

“PAM, always a pleasure,” Deacon intoned, and PAM’s head buzzed as she looked at him. 

“Unknown response indicated. Agent Deacon.”

Des sighed with a roll of her eyes, “PAM, I need some information on Deacon’s whereabouts.”

“Woah, woah, boss, why don’t you just ask me?”

“Because you’re a lying rat. PAM is programmed to tell me the god-honest truth. PAM, where was Deacon two days ago?”

“Agent Deacon reported in Diamond City two days ago. Motives unknown.”

“Deacon, what were you doing in Diamond City?”

He groaned and collapsed into PAM’s office chair. “I told you, Des. I like to have personal projects on my own time. Are you going to start keeping track of when I pee? Do you want a write up on my sleeping habits?”

“No, Deacon, I want you to tell me _what_ you were _doing_ in Diamond City, and I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit about your new _hobbies.”_

Des was serious. She rarely lost her head, and she wasn’t about to then, but Deacon could see the oncoming signs of head-loss. Her nostrils flared, her green eyes narrowed, her cigarette extinguished on the sole of her boot. She was going to get answers if she had to scalp him for them. 

“You’ve been watching her, Deacon. They talk about her on the radio in Diamond City, all the things she’s up to. She’s the one you’ve been following.”

“Alright, Des. Where do I start?”

“The beginning.”

“It all started in the summer of 2253, when my mother and father conceived—“

“ _Spare me the gory details, Deacon._ ”

“Fine, fine.”

He tilted his head back onto the chair’s soft backing and spun around once or twice, considering his options. He could lie to her, point blank. Or, he could tell her the truth. Or, he could lie. 

He could definitely lie. 

But then he pictured the vault-dweller’s face in his mind, her smile full of pristine white teeth, never-been-touched by radiation. She’d knocked a scar across her left brow, but it hardly made a dent. 

And yet, in all her pin-up, pre-war glory, she cursed like a sailor, fought like a soldier, and told the truth like she was programmed to do nothing less. Maybe she was PAM’s sister— an Assaultron with a pretty, fleshy face. 

“I was following her to Diamond City. I watched her come out of that vault, and I’ve watched her ever since. She’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, Des.”

“A new agent?”

“I think so.”

“Deacon, we can’t afford to train up a new agent. Not after Switchboard. We don’t have the time.”

“I know. I know, Des. Just wishful thinking, I guess.”

Des walked out of the room, staunch and silent. His eyes followed her before glancing at PAM. He was about to make a snarky comment towards the robot in the midst of her errant statistical meandering, but the click of Desdemona’s boot heel against the floor silenced him.

“Don’t stop watching her, though, Deacon.”

“You got it, boss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally, I wish that I knew Glory and Tinker Tom in real life because I assume they would be really great friends. Railroad HQ always seems like a lively and fun place to be. I hope October is treating everyone well, and I hope that you find some time to relax this week! Love you all!! <3


	7. GREAT GREEN JEWEL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! I hope everyone is doing well!! I love Piper so much, and I really loved writing her in this chapter. She's got such a fun personality, and she's so passionate. I hope you all enjoy this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Love you all!! <3

_VII. GREAT GREEN JEWEL_

From the moment Nora saw her, she was _enraptured._ The way her hands flew at the speed of her mouth, the way she spoke so quickly but coherently, it was incredible. It was something Nora was fully unequipped to comprehend, and there was a stiff delay between hearing the words and interpreting them. 

She was yelling into an intercom, but gesturing as if she were face to face with the dull-voiced man on the other end. 

“Hey, you,” she finally hissed, though not menacingly, at Nora. “You want to get into Diamond City, right?”

Nora stared at her blankly. The woman’s eyes prompted her to speak, but her tongue was dormant. She had never seen a woman who had spoken so passionately in the presence of a man. She wanted to cry, wanted to hug her, wanted to be her best friend in the whole entire world. 

The first time Nora had spotted Dogmeat at the Red Rocket, the pup had bounded up and down on his front paws and licked all over her face until she had no choice but to bring him along. 

That’s how she felt on the inside now, watching as Piper silently encouraged an answer from her. 

“Yes,” she said lamely. It was an answer, but not the poetics she had hoped for in this obviously momentous occasion. 

“Oh, what’s that you say? You’re with a caravan? You’ve got enough goods to keep Diamond City stocked up for months? Wow, you hear that Danny? And you’re just gonna let this lady starve at the gate?”

“Gee, I dunno, Piper,” Danny mumbled through the speaker. “Last time I let you in—“

“You want to tell Crazy Myrna that you turned away a caravan full of supplies?”

And that was how Nora had gotten into Diamond City. It’s rusty green garage gate creaked open to welcome her, or at least to let her in, and now she lay with her head reclined on Piper’s sofa. Apparently, just by virtue of her status as a vault dweller, she was newsworthy. 

She would never understand how much the people of the wasteland took interest in her, how fascinating they found her to be. 

“It’s fucking crazy, man,” she said, her tongue feeling loose in the presence of the excitable reporter. Piper laughed, and Nora saw something catch in her eye, something she couldn’t yet put a name to. “I mean, ever since I stepped out of that goddamn vault, I hit the ground running. Find my old house, find Concord, kill a few raiders, kill one of those… what are they called? Everything here has new names.”

Piper leaned forward with her knees on her elbows. Her gloves creased as she wrapped her hand tighter around her pencil with interest, saying, “Yeah, the Wasteland has all kinds of creepers. What did it look like?”

“One of those _huge_ lizard things. With the horns. Like Satan and an iguana had a love-child. Came raging down the street from the gutters, but I guess I should’ve known after Mama Murphy warned me—“

“A _Deathclaw?_ You killed a Deathclaw in the middle of Concord?”

“Yes! That’s what it’s called. I mean, I had a mini-gun, so it wasn’t bad.”

“You’re telling me that you, Blue, fresh out of the vault, made it through a raider group into Concord, and killed a Deathclaw with an old mini-gun? Wearing nothing but a vault suit?”

“…Well, all of your facts are correct, but you’re making me sound a whole lot cooler than I am.”

“I’m not making you sound a fraction of how cool you are.”

Nora laughed as Piper hurriedly jotted down the details of her run-in with the Concord Deathclaw, and she wondered just how many things she had done that she should have been more afraid of.

And it wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid— the Deathclaw had made her near piss her pants, but maybe she should have _actually_ pissed her pants. 

“That’s your superpower,” Piper chimed in, as if reading the vaguely concerned expression on Nora’s face. She leaned back on the dusty red couch with a smug expression on her face. She was about the break a story that would put Publick Occurrences back on the good side of Diamond City. 

“Yeah, sure. My superpower.”

“I’m serious, Blue. You’re a terror of the Wasteland because you don’t know what to be afraid of. If you had known that the Deathclaw was called a Deathclaw, you would have run. Your ignorance is your superpower.”

To Nora’s surprise, she began to laugh at the thought. 

She was still just as enamored with Piper as she had been when she had first arrived at the gates. When Piper had told Nora she was a reporter, Nora had been unsure of her motives, but by the end of the afternoon, she was full aware that she had told her things she had never told anyone.

“Speaking of my ignorance,” Nora led with a groan as she lifted herself into a sitting position. In the calm amber glow of Piper’s little home beside Publick Occurrences, it was difficult to remember why she was in the city in the first place. She had come seeking help. “Who around here can help out with a missing kid?”

“A missing kid? Are you missing a child?” Piper’s eyes were now wide with shock. “You should have led with that! Do you think it was the Institute?”

“I don’t know what the Institute is. I just know that someone took my child, and I need to find him.”

“Oh my god,” Piper cooed, and Nora felt a bland distaste in her mouth. They had been having such fun, and Nora had to go and ruin it with a kidnapping story. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”

“Yeah, uh… thanks.”

“I bet Nicky could help you. Detective Nick Valentine. He’s got an office here in Diamond City, if you follow the road past the message board and down into the alleyway. His secretary should be able to schedule you an appointment, though— well, come to think of it, I haven’t seen Valentine around lately. But I’m sure he can fit you into his schedule, for a missing kid.”

Nora took in all the information with glassy eyes. She wanted to be one thing or another, not all of it at once. She wanted to either be a pre-war poster child of domestic bliss or a fierce wasteland freedom fighter. She couldn’t _stand_ being both, especially not with the _grieving widow_ moniker that hung over her head like a personal rain cloud. 

_Grieving_ wasn’t quite the word for it, not yet. _Motivated._ She was _motivated._

“Do you have somewhere to stay? I guess you don’t know anyone out there in the big bad world.” Piper stood and ran her tap for a few seconds before filling her water glass. “You gotta watch the water around here. Sheng isn’t great at cleaning out the lake.”

“Noted. And no, I don’t know anyone. I’ve just been hopping from place to place. You have recommendations?”

“The couch you’re on right now is always open, free of charge.”

“Thanks, Pipes.”

“Oh, I like the nickname.”

Nora giggled. Her chest expanded with the mirth that filled her lungs when she looked at Piper, like a little girl at her first sleepover. Nora’s first sleepover had been with Mary Jane Goode, who have lived across the street. Mrs. Goode had made them cinnamon rolls in the morning for breakfast with little strawberries cut into heart shapes. 

Nora doubted she would see any of those soon— she was nearly sure that strawberries didn’t exist anymore. But she would settle for a glass of dubious water and a can of cram at Piper’s little breakfast nook.

When she emerged from the little Publick Occurrences office, she immediately found herself lost. Diamond City wasn’t large. It did, after all, have to fit within the bounds of a standard-sized baseball field, but it somehow found a way to wind endlessly into little dingy alleyways and inlets. 

She hadn’t the time to consider her surroundings, because leaning casually against the chapel’s front wall was a familiar face.

There he was. His head was reflecting the stadium lights, which she would have found quite humorous, had she not been so frightened by the fact that she now knew for sure that this man had been following her. 

In her old life, a man following her would have had criminal prospects, and though she couldn’t read the intentions of this post-war stalker, she had the dreary feeling that they were somehow even more sinister. 

She made the executive decision in her mind that she was going to confront him, and she was going to do it coolly and calmly. This would be a friendly introduction, not accusatory or inflammatory, and if he was dangerous, she would find out now before he could do anything awful to her. 

She wondered errantly if her powers of seduction were functional, and if she would have to resort to that. She had never attempted to seduce anyone in her life, not even Nate. She had never _wanted_ to seduce Nate, and lucky for her, she hadn’t had to. That bastard was randy enough on his own, without her assistance, thank you very much. 

“Hey, stranger,” she muttered above the din of the marketplace. He turned to her suspiciously. “Haven’t I seen you around before? In Goodneighbor?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I get around.”

“Hmm. If I didn’t know any better, I might think that you’re following me.”

“Just doing my job, ma’am.”

“And your job is?” She inquired, wanting so desperately to catch him in a lie, but if he was lying as she suspected he was, he was doing an incredible job of acting as though _she_ were the one bothering _him._ She began to wonder if she had fabricated the whole incident in her head.

“Check the uniform,” he uttered lamely, with the general blasé attitude of a standard DC guard. She felt unnaturally angry, and she hated that feeling. She had given the wasteland every bit of her honesty, and here was this man, obviously tracking her for some unknown reason, who wouldn’t give her the time of day. 

She felt irrational. She was going to hate herself in just a few moments, but there was no stopping the rapid intake of her lungs and the beating of her heart. She _was_ going to say something.

She was going to be like _Piper_ — disarmingly passionate.

“Listen, fucker,” she whispered, and his left eyebrow raised at her. She double-checked her surroundings, not wanting to cause a scene. “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know who anybody is. I’m nobody. I’m just some lady who crawled out of a vault a couple months ago, no money to my name, no family. If you are following me— which I _know_ you are— you need to tell me what you need from me right fucking now, because I don’t know anything about anybody. Whatever kind of information or money or power you think you’re going to get from me, I don’t have it. I have twelve caps, a rusty baseball bat, and a pocket full of expiring bug meat. That’s it. _Please.”_

The man simply chuckled and tipped his sunglasses up fully onto the bridge of his nose, saying, “Nobody’s nobody. Catch you around, sister.”

His left eyebrow twitched as though he had winked, though she couldn’t see behind his dark shades. His brows were a light reddish, and she noted with interest that she was _sure_ she had seen him sporting raven black hair in Goodneighbor. 

“You ever get around to following the Freedom Trail, sister?” Was his only parting comment. 

Of course, he was asking something of her. 

_Go to Concord. Kill this lizard for us, Nora. You’ve never held a gun in your life? I’m sure you can figure it out. Go to Diamond City. Hire a private detective, I guess. Follow the Freedom Trail. Join the Brotherhood. Have you followed the Freedom Trail yet?_

_Shit, I still haven’t brought Kent his costume._

She looked off into the distance as the stranger disappeared. Her calendar was wildly hectic, and while a part of her felt grateful for the business, part of her wanted to turn around as soon as she came across the blinding, flickering neon of Valentine’s Detective Agency. 

She could run away. She could go into hiding. She could disappear under mysterious circumstances— just walk into the woods and never come back. She could let Shaun stay with the Institute, the Gunners, whoever the fuck had him. 

But that would be too easy. And the wasteland wasn’t finished with her yet.

She opened the door to Valentine’s Detective Agency.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is anyone planning on watching the debate tonight? I hear that mics will be muted, which will certainly do some good. Keeping up with politics is exhausting, but important. I hope you all find some rest this weekend!!


	8. ROBOT MAN, TAKE ME BY THE HAND

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Next chapter, Nora will finally arrive at Railroad HQ, but first, I wanted to introduce another friendly face, one that I love very much. It's a crime that you can't romance Nick Valentine, right? He's such a delight. I hope you all enjoy this chapter, and rest assured that my incredibly long exposition will be done soon. Love you all!! <3

_VIII. ROBOT MAN, TAKE ME BY THE HAND_

She opened the door to the Overseer’s office. 

_Jesus Christ. Who would have thought I’d have to become a private detective just so I can locate a private detective?_

She had fought through what was, by all accounts, the Mafia. Why the Mob found it necessary to exist in a post-nuclear hellscape, she had no earthly idea. Perhaps it was just the feeling of family that kept them together. 

She, however, felt none of that familial bonding from the second she had entered Park Street Station. Though she was uniformed in her brand new armored Silver Shroud costume, complete with thick-brimmed black hat, the mobsters had no qualms about opening fire on her the second she had stepped into the station. 

Now, she was finally stepping into the office where she would inevitably find Nick Valentine, detective extraordinaire, grateful to her for his rescue and ready to help her locate her missing child. 

She found a robot instead. 

“What the fuck are you?” She breathed, wincing at how the question sounded aloud. She had become so used to traveling by herself or with Dogmeat that it was becoming increasingly difficult to filter her words when she was around others. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

He gave a wry chuckle and lifted the cigarette to his mouth. “Gotta love the irony of the reverse damsel-in-distress scenario. Question is, why would our heroine risk life and limb for an old private eye?”

Her jaw tightened, but her lips curled into a smile. He was a smooth operator, Nick Valentine. Had he not had a carved up face and a skeletal metal hand, he might have been quite the charmer. 

“Looking for someone. I was told you can help me.”

“Well, you came to the right man in the wrong place. What say we get out of here before Skinny Malone realizes his hired oaf isn’t coming back?”

She nodded and cocked her pistol once more, trailing behind Valentine as he led her from the vault. 

_A detective that talks like Jimmy Stewart. A gangster named Skinny Malone. Am I in a Hollywood movie? Is this all a dream? Did I die in the bombings, and now am in some strange and intricate hell?_

Her life was getting stranger by the second, which was why she figured that it must all be perfectly real, as she had never been able to come up with a dream that had such a cohesive narrative. 

_If this is all in my head, I’ve really done some improvement on my storyboarding._

As she followed the detective through the inner halls of the vault, picking off gangsters on their way to freedom, she realized how much she hated being inside a vault again. It was too clean, too sanitary. 

Of course, Vault 111 had not been constructed with the idea of families dwelling happily inside, so the bedroom and nurseries were a pleasant surprise, but as soon as she had entered through the massive gear-shaped door, she had an acrid taste in her mouth and the feeling that she might be sick. 

With every loud _whoosh_ of the heavy sliding doors, she regressed into the terrified woman she had been months ago, crawling headfirst out of the vault with blood on her hands and the cold of the cryogenic pod still creeping down her veins like a drop of water down a slowly heating icicle. She felt the cold again, in Vault 114. 

“You alright, kid?” Valentine questioned as she stood frozen in the alleyway outside the hatch door of Park Street Station. She realized she must have been staring vacantly into the night sky. 

“Yeah, sorry. What did you say?”

“You want to come with me back to Diamond City, or do you want to meet me there?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

She didn’t want another bad first impression with Nick Valentine. She had already insulted him once when she had first seen him, and she didn’t want to become the weird client who cried in alleyways. She waited until he left to become the weird client that cried in alleyways. 

Dogmeat’s cold, wet nose was usually a comfort to her when it pressed so lovingly against her cheek, but it now only reminded her of the vault. She had crawled out of her pod, heaving cryogenic liquid from her lungs and freezing to her core, only to be reminded that everyone she had known was dead. Nate was dead, Shaun was kidnapped, and she was blindingly alone. 

In her desperate attempts at finding life, she had pulled herself across the floor on still-frozen legs to Natalie Hawthorne’s chamber. Natalie was curled into herself with her head tucked carefully to her collarbone and her fists loosely clenched. She had died as if she were in a deep sleep. If she had a blanket over her, Nora might not have recognized that she was a frigid corpse. 

Against her better judgement, Nora had opened the pod and touched her friend with reverence. No tears came to her eyes, but there was a filling pain in her lungs that seemed to expand with each breath, and she wondered if she were slowly dying. 

_If I’m going to die, I might as well die here, with Natalie Hawthorne. We can rest in peace together._

But she hadn’t died, and now she was crying in a dingy alleyway, trying to muster the courage to follow her new robot-detective friend to a baseball field. 

Life was funny like that.

Deacon saw it happen. He had watched her go into Park Street Station that afternoon, and he had taken a walk around the Commons— a very quiet, _Do-Not-Disturb-The-Behemoth-In-The-Pond,_ kind of walk— before planting himself at the street-level exit to the station’s vault. He knew she would probably emerge shortly after sunset, making relatively short work of the Triggermen that guarded the Mob Boss’s designated vault. 

When the door had opened, he had hidden behind a wall and watched her climb out, following the synth detective that worked out of Diamond City— the one that had a funny name, like an old holiday. 

_Detective Christmas, on the case. No, that’s wrong. Dr. Halloween, at your service. Now, that’s just silly._

After she had sent the detective on his way— _Detective St. Patrick! Absolutely not—_ she had stared upward at the sky, letting a sheen of misty rain cover her face under the soft glow of a patch of fungus. He probably should have warned her that the rain wasn’t exactly human-friendly, even when it wasn’t during a Radstorm, but he held back on his snarky comments. 

After all, she didn’t know him like he knew her, and he was beginning to feel like he knew her incredibly well. To her, he was a stalker. The bald fool with the sunglasses that followed her around like a lost puppy, poorly disguised and always watching. He wondered if she even _cared_ at that point that he was watching, or if he was just an annoyance, like the constant buzzing of a fly in her ears. 

It was pathetic, really, how he admired her so much when she probably saw him as a pest, but he couldn’t help it. He chalked it up to pure science— this was a mission, an experiment, to see if she could pass muster for Railroad duties. He was not forming a schoolboy _crush_ on Little Miss _Icicle._

But, his heart did sink pitifully when she suddenly slumped into a corner, tucking her knees to her chest and hiding her head in them like a frightened child. He could hardly see her now. The glow of the fungus wasn’t enough to carry his vision all the way to the alley’s corner, but he could see her silhouette, and he could hear her. It was _worse_ that he could hear her, rather than see her.

If he could see her, he might convince himself that the uneven bobbing of her shoulders was laughter, and that the way she wrapped her arms over her head as if she were afraid that it would roll off was simply a funny mannerism. But since he could hear her, he knew that this wasn’t true, and he knew that he was watching from behind a brick wall, doing absolutely nothing as she openly wept in the alleyway. 

_C’mon, Dogmeat. Give her a hug. Grow longer arms and give her a hug, because it would be really creepy if I tried to do that right now._

The mutt pushed his nose against her cheek, and she flinched. She was shivering. The night air was temperate, but she shook as though it were mid-winter, as though she were covered head to toe in fresh snow. 

_I should do something. She’s having some kind of attack. She’s not doing so well. I should give her a jacket, I should make her some coffee, I should—_

_I should stay behind this wall. I should walk away, actually. She can take care of herself, and she probably doesn’t want my help, not after Diamond City._

He took one last look at her wavering form, and against his better judgement, he walked away. 

At Valentine’s Detective Agency, she had begun to feel better. The warmth of the secretary’s grateful embrace felt like a clean cup of hot chocolate, and even the comfort of the flattened patchwork office chair that sat across from Nick gave her a homey feeling. She liked this place, she decided, and she liked it much better with both Nick and his secretary inside. They seemed like family. 

Nick was sorting through a mess of files on his desk before opening a new folder with a crisp sheet of cream-colored paper. He wrote her name in cursive script across the top. 

She stared at him. She didn’t really want to, but she did because she couldn’t help herself. She figured that if he brought it up, she might play the _I-Just-Stumbled-Out-Of-Cryogenic-Storage_ card. The classic _My-Husband-Was-Shot-And-I’ve-Never-Seen-A-Robot-That-Doesn’t-Look-Like-A-Christmas-Ornament-With-Arms_ card. 

“Never met a synth, I assume?” He inquired as if reading her mind. She still wasn’t positive that he couldn’t, based on what Piper seemed to think about synths. She hadn’t mentioned that Diamond City’s most beloved detective was one, however, 

“Sorry,” Nora replied bashfully. The woman in the back—Ellie, her name was—gave a sympathetic sort of smile. “Your eyes are kind of freaky, but I really like that.”

“And I really like your honesty, kid,” Valentine intoned, tapping a cigarette from his carton and offering her one, which she refused as she minded Ellie’s gentle laughter. “Tell me about your son, the last time you saw him. I know it must be hard for you, but—“

“It was a couple weeks ago, in that vault. The man who shot my husband took him. He was bald on top and had a scar on his face.”

Nora rushed her answer, and she had hated the surprise on the detective’s face when she cut him off so abruptly, but she had never once played the grieving widow since she had stumbled into the wasteland, and she wasn’t going to start that just because some old-fashioned robot detective thought she should be. The fact that she had strung that sentiment together in her head at all told her all she needed to know— the world wasn’t the way it used to be, and she couldn’t survive if she pretended as though it were.

“Sorry, Detective Valentine, I didn’t mean to interrupt, I— I just mean that you don’t need to walk on eggshells about it. I know your intentions were good, but I’m no damsel-in-distress, not like you were in that vault.”

He grinned, and it felt warm. How a robot could make her feel warm with a cold metal smile was beyond her, but she felt it flush in her chest. 

“Well, if you’re done being a smartass,” he joked, reclining in his chair, “I might have some prime information for you. Ellie, could you pull the file on the Kellogg case for us?”

Nick was a good man. He wasn’t necessarily a man, but he was a good one. A good _synth._ That thought stuck in her head most of all— Nick was a good _synth._ And if Nick could be so good, why couldn’t any of the rest? 

In hindsight, she was glad not to have made any lasting commitments to the Brotherhood of Steel. That settled it, finally. She was going to have to find the Railroad. 

“I think both of us would be better suited to carry on after we’ve had some rest,” Nick proposed as he watched her finish a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Do you sleep? Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”

“Perfectly alright, doll. I don’t sleep, but Ellie here does, and so do you. Goodnight, Nora.”

When she stepped out into the cool air of the Diamond City marketplace, she felt better. She was now tracing a lead, she had met a new friend, and she had Piper’s couch to sleep on for the night. Everything was going as well as it possibly could, except for…

_Him._

He seemed to appear just about everywhere. She thought of him, and he would appear, leaning against some wall or sitting with his crossed legs outstretched in front of him on the lonely pew outside the chapel. He would be smoking a cigarette in a shady corner of Goodneighbor or watching her trade caps and ammo with KLEO. 

Now, he was sitting at a stool outside Power Noodles, nursing a Nuka-Cherry with his black-haired wig on and his shades dipping dangerously close to showing his eyes. 

_The Shady Drifter_ was what she had taken to calling him in her mind. It gave her some small source of humor despite the fear that he was stalking her. But, he hadn’t killed her yet, and he had ample opportunity, so she steadied her trembling hands and stared at him, willing him to look up at her. 

In the faltering evening light, he looked different. He looked more like a human than she had ever seen him appear— not that she had assumed he was anything but. She simply hadn’t considered that he was a man, likely not more than 10 years older than her, if even that. Where had he come from? Did he have a family?

He mentioned something to the waiter— a Protectron she could never quite remember the name of—and giggled to himself. Just as she had fully begun to romanticize the mystery of him, he looked up directly at her as if he knew she had been looking the whole time. A curious smile crossed his face. He waved. 

_Son of a bitch bastard, who do you think you are? Waving at me like we’re friends? Dickwad. Perpetual imbecile. Fuckhead._

She flipped him off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I post this, I will probably be grading papers for the next 8 hours. It's tough work, but I've found that I'm quite proud of the students who are able to even simply turn in assignments during this time. Take it from your friendly local grad student: even if you feel like you aren't doing much, you are doing so well. You are surviving during a really tough time, and that in itself is something to be proud of. Go easy on yourself, and be patient with yourself. Take some time to rest, take time to appreciate yourself. I hope you can find some sense of relaxation while reading my stories, as I have found while writing them. Much love to all of you <3 :)


	9. PASSWORD PASSWORD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Happy Tuesday! Here is the first official, Railroad-sponsored meeting. I hope you all enjoy this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it! Love you all!! <3

_IX. PASSWORD PASSWORD_

“She flipped me off.”

“Well, that’s progress, I guess. At least she’s figured out that you’re an asshole.”

“You wound me, Glory. Tom doesn’t think I’m an asshole, right Tom?”

“You’re not an asshole, Deacon.”

“Thank you, Tom.”

“Your head does look like a shaved butt cheek, though.”

Laughter erupted throughout the entire hub of Railroad HQ as Deacon tried in vain to defend his honor and whatever remaining dignity he had. His bald head was a triumph of disguise ingenuity— though, he had to admit, it did look a bit like a shaved butt cheek. Even Carrington’s harsh scowl broke into a smile at Tom’s suggestion. 

These were the days the Railroad cherished. Nearly all their safe houses had reported positively at the dead drops, there were no agents out on mission that afternoon, and PAM had predicted a day of something close to rest. There was never truly a day of rest at HQ, but every so often, there was a bit of leisure. 

Deacon clapped Tom on the back in appreciation of the good humor before taking off through the back door to take a leak. 

_If only Tom could stop trying to communicate with extraterrestrials and install some good plumbing,_ he thought. 

As soon as he had left the hub, and the laughter had died to lingering smiles, Desdemona’s head snapped upward from her map. Her hands tightened, and she pressed her lips closed around her cigarette as she listened. 

There was a noise clanging through the crypts. Someone was coming through the front door, and they hadn’t even bothered to ring the doorbell. 

“Glory,” she commanded. Glory gazed at her lazily from the couch. “Up and at ‘em. Someone’s coming.”

Suddenly, the whole team was up and running like a well-oiled machine, stocking pistols with ammo and loading rifles. Glory had already hoisted her trusty mini-gun onto her hip and was toting it threateningly towards the doorway that led to the Railroad’s sealed entrance. 

In the dark and silence, they could all hear the turntable clicking around at a steady pace as the intruder entered the password. Desdemona kept track of it in her mind and held her hand aloft, waiting to give the signal to the armed guards surrounding her. 

When the lights burst on, Desdemona was nearly ready to give a sigh of relief. The intruder was a woman, likely in her late twenties, with a mutt lolling about at her side. She wore a pair of jeans, a black t-shirt, and a faded pair of black Gunner boots, likely stolen. She stood with her hands tucked close to her side, her legs stiff as she tried to make herself small against the harsh glare of the lights now beaming right at her. She was no immediate threat. Des lowered her hand. 

“Who are you?”

“I’m looking for the Railroad?” She called in shock at the small army that now stood in the open doorway. “I’m friendly, I promise.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. Who. Are. You.”

“My name is Nora, but that’s probably not going to help you any. Maybe we can sit down and talk? With less guns? I have thirteen caps, if you want that.”

_The Welcoming Committee is certainly doing a poor job,_ Nora thought with a grimace. She looked over the motley crew. Most were armed with small pistols or combat rifles, except for one at the end. A woman with smooth, dark skin and whitening hair held aloft a mini-gun. Nora immediately found her incredibly interesting, but couldn’t process it on account of the aforementioned mini-gun. 

“We don’t want your caps. What do you want from us?”

“You’re the lady from the tape, aren’t you? You have such a nice voice. I want to help, I guess. I want to know what a synth is, first of all. I also want to know what the Institute is, and how to get there, because they might have my kid.”

“The Institute took your child? For your sake, I hope that’s not true.”

“Yeah, well, I hope not too. Can you help?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know how you found us, but we’re not a missing child network. We have a job to do.”

“But—“ Nora began, before she was unceremoniously interrupted by someone’s fashionably late entrance. 

“Woah, hey, are you guys having a party? What gives with my invitation?”

“ _You,”_ Nora huffed, both in surprise and embarrassment, as the _Shady Drifter_ made his fabulously late entrance into the crypt. Desdemona flicked her eyes suspiciously from him to their newcomer, obviously sensing a connection she wasn’t sure she approved of. 

Was this the vault dweller who had stirred up so much in the Commonwealth? She had asked him to keep an eye on her, not _stalk_ her. 

Nora wanted more than ever to lie down on the ground, throw her fists into the dirt, and have a proper tantrum. Shaun had once thrust a tiny fist against her shoulder in a fit of baby-rage, and she had noted above all that the little act of rebellion looked cathartic despite its inefficacy. _Oh, to be able to scream at people without repercussions._

_Did she not send him to spy on me?_ Nora thought. _Was this not her idea all along?_

“Des, you might want to rethink that. This lady’s not messing around.”

“Deacon, nice of you to join us,” Desdemona intoned. This had happened before, Nora thought. This was standard activity for the Shady Drifter, and she was just caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare between Desdemona and Shady Drifter. “What makes this one so special?”

“What, you haven’t heard?”

“No, Deacon. Tell me.” Like a mother, exhausted with her child’s antics. 

“This lady saved Amelia Stockton from those freaks in Covenant. That wins you _major_ points in my book. And she’s the _General_ of the Minutemen. Only one of those in the whole entire Commonwealth, boss. She’s done things no one else would even think about doing, been places no one else would dare to go.”

Nora was caught between her desire to fit in with the Railroad and the inflammatory nature of Deacon’s statements. She had confronted him, and he hadn’t thought to let her in on the fact that he was trying to help her, and why not? Just to be stubborn? To keep his air of mystery? To make her indebted to him?

He was playing a game, and he hadn’t even bothered to tell her the rules.

“If Deacon speaks this highly of you, I suppose we can let you help, but we don’t have time to train up a new agent. Talk to Drummer Boy for your assignments.”

And just like that, the meeting ended, leaving Nora and Dogmeat stranded alone at the opposite doorway. She watched Deacon with wary eyes as he strolled down the steps in her direction, and she met him halfway. 

“ _Deacon_ ,” she muttered curtly. He smirked, and she had to try desperately not to find it endearing, and instead to maintain a steady level of _pissed-off_ so she could properly confront him. “Why did you vouch for me like that?”

“Wow, just straight to business with you, huh? No friendly greeting? No, ‘ _It’s so lovely to meet you, Deacon, thank you ever so much for sticking up for me’ ?_ ” 

“My apologies, but I think I have the right to be a little suspicious after you followed me for months and refused to tell me why.”

“ _This_ was why, my friend. You followed the Freedom Trail. Hey, you’re pretty smart to pick up on the little password clues Tom left along the way, huh? Pretty clever of him, if I do say so myself.”

Nora scoffed, covering her mouth with her hand before erupting into peeling laughter. She bent slightly at the waist as her shoulders bobbed with her great heaving laughs, and Deacon just watched in confusion. 

“What’s so funny?”

“Buddy, I didn’t even know there were clues. I guessed the password on the first try, and I guessed it as a joke. The password to get into the Railroad is _Railroad._ You’ve got to beef up the security a little bit if you don’t want to have to bring out the full Welcoming Committee every time someone manages to stumble in because the password is the _name of the organization._ ”

“Well, what would you suggest?”

“I don’t know. Something cool,” she replied, seeing the letters in her head. There was a limited scope of alphabet for her to work with, but she also felt that her response and its humor or lack thereof would be integral to her value as a future Railroad agent. “Something like… _Dome Head_. That way they’ll know the bald stalker sent them.”

“Yeah, yeah, very funny. I was going to make you an offer, but now that you’ve openly criticized our top secret password _and_ my slick hairstyle, I’m having second thoughts.”

Nora raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t prepared for anything that had happened since she had started wandering down the Freedom Trail. Before she could even start her Boston field trip, she had to sneak past a raging Super Mutant the size of a building that had been throwing rocks— no, _boulders_ — at a raider group nearby. Then, there had been the ghouls, and the mongrels, and the regular-sized-but-still-not-friendlier Super Mutants at Faneuil that had shot a _goddamn missile at her head._

Now, she had offered to help, been turned down a job, and was trying to smooth-talk her way into getting Deacon to tell her what the hell he had been following her for. He was still messing with her— of that, she could be sure. He was proud that he had been able to rile her up enough to land her at the entrance to Railroad HQ, and allowing him that victory was frustrating. 

She had once thought him a spy, but she was no longer so sure of that description.

_He’s not a very good spy if I picked him out so quickly. He’s just outrageously lucky and frustratingly charming._

“Alright, I’m listening,” she finally settled, pushing her hands into her pockets and letting Deacon take the reins of the negotiation.

“Look, I’ve seen what you’re capable of, and I think Des is making a big mistake. If you agree to do a job with me— something _real_ important— I’m sure she’ll agree to train you as a proper agent.”

“I’ll think about it, Deacon.”

“C’mon, it’ll be dangerous.”

“And why do you think that will convince me to sign on?”

He smiled a knowing and smug smile, and she regretted asking.

“You live for that kind of thing, don’t you? You go wandering into ratholes and ghoul nests of all kinds for no reason other than that you’re curious to see what’s inside.”

She knew exactly what she meant. She could recall every single time she had fought her way through a parade of feral ghouls just to see what was inside a locked box in the corner of a crumbling house. She couldn’t count on both hands the number of times she had risked life and limb to grasp a lone teddy bear by the arm to drag along with her. She had a collection of teddy bears, all of them retrieved at incredibly inconvenient times. 

The wasteland had challenged her the second she emerged from the vault, and at every turn, she had bitten back. And why not? She had nothing better to do, after all. 

Deacon watched her expression through the tint of his sunglasses, and he knew his plan was working exactly as planned. Well, not _exactly_ as planned. He hadn’t planned on her noticing his presence aside from a few definite orchestrated meetings, and he hadn’t planned on her flipping him off in the middle of Diamond City, but she was annoyingly observant and dangerously passionate. He might have said that these were good traits of a Railroad agent, but it stung him a bit to know that the best skills on her resume were the ones that had gotten his cover nearly blown. 

But he wasn’t mad. In fact, it was a challenge to him. In the future, he would be sneakier, less impulsive. He was proud of her for making it that far, and most importantly, he was happy that she was in the Old North Church, making plans with the Railroad. 

It was the least he could do, after all, to bring the prodigy to the Railroad. She had busted right out of Vault 111 like a secret weapon the old world had been hiding in case of emergency, and he had led her straight into Desdemona’s lap. He had a lifetime’s worth of debts to pay, and he reckoned this new ally would help him rectify his past at least a little bit. 

Nora bent to scratch between Dogmeat’s ears before sending him into the Railroad’s hub behind a cooing Glory. It was amazing, Nora thought, how two seconds earlier, Glory had been pointing a mini-gun at a stranger’s face, and now she was baby-talking to a dog who followed at her heel. 

Nora sighed, “Alright, Deacon. I’ll tag along. But I have a request, in exchange for my services to the Railroad.”

“And what would that be, your highness?”

“Cut the bullshit,” she snipped. She _wanted_ to be Deacon’s friend, and perhaps if he hadn’t stalked her and snarked at her when she had asked about if for several months, she would have been more lenient on him. But Deacon had been a proper asshole, and though she found herself somewhat charmed by his dry wit, she had to steel herself. 

“That’s a pretty vague request, boss.”

“You know what I mean. I’m still new to this _apocalypse_ business, and quite frankly, I’m exhausted. I don’t need to waste my time trying to figure out if you’re lying or not, so just make it easier on the both of us, and _cut the bullshit.”_

He shook her hand wordlessly. This was not a request he could reasonably fulfill, but it was a request he could _pretend_ to fulfill rather seamlessly. 

“You got it, boss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October is nearly done! I still plan to dress up for Halloween, even though Halloween isn't really happening. I'll just be in full costume on my couch, eating candy. That's a pretty exciting night, I think. :)


	10. ONE FOR THE ROAD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Nora had a nickel for every time she had been in a sewer, she would have three nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened thrice.   
> Hello friends!! Welcome to chapter 10. The first time I played through with Deacon, I didn't read his recall code for a REALLY long time, because I 100% believed him, and I thought it would be disrespectful or something like that. Now I know better. ;) Love you all!!<3

_X. ONE FOR THE ROAD_

Deacon was a chatty partner. Nora had left Dogmeat in the care of the good people of the Railroad, promising that she would be back to give him pats and treats in no time. It hurt to leave the little guy, but traveling with more than one companion made her nervous. That was two backs she had to watch, not including her own. Dogmeat had been a mostly silent but excitable companion.

Deacon was still somewhat excitable, but largely more vocal than the mutt. He had explained to her dead drops, rail signs, tourists. That’s what she was to the Railroad at the moment— a tourist.

“You know, back before the war, tourists were people who were on vacation. They were having _fun,”_ she explained to him as they turned down another drainage pipe. Before the war, she hadn’t had to go into a single sewer. She had been in at least three after the war, which wasn’t statistically a large number of sewers, but it was at least an outlier in her own experience. 

“Are you not having fun?”

“I nearly got killed by a robot. A _synth,_ I mean. I nearly got killed by multiple synths. I have never had blue laser bullets shot at my head before, so you’ll excuse me if I’m not having a glamorous day.”

She _was,_ in fact, having a glamorous day. The sneaking, the hushed tones, the mystery of it all— it was beyond alluring, and she lived for the day she would get to do it again. She just wasn’t entirely done being frustrated with Deacon quite yet.

“C’mon, that was nothing for you,” Deacon dismissed with a wave of his hand. Their voices were low as they crept through the halls of the old Switchboard location. They were picking up a _prototype,_ which sounded incredibly interesting and scientific, but Deacon had already refused her an answer on what exactly the prototype was. 

“You told me to cut the bullshit,” he had explained with a laissez-faire flick of his hat. “If I don’t tell you anything, I’m not bullshitting you.”

She had to admit, he was technically right, but she couldn’t get over the idea that she was arguing with a child about his bed time. 

Perhaps, she thought, she had been too harsh in asking him to _cut the bullshit_ , but if she was going to join a shadowy underground organization, she _needed_ to know what was going on. It was protection more than personal preference. The truth would keep her safe, keep her alive long enough to find Shaun. 

In a flash, Deacon had pulled out an automatic laser pistol he had pulled off of a dead synth and was firing rapidly down a hallway at a group that was moving in on them. Nora snatched her trusty baseball bat, Honey, and went running down the hallway towards the encroaching synths with a stunted yell. 

“That’s maybe not the best way to go about— okay, you do what you need to do, boss.”

Despite Deacon’s protestations, she smashed at the synths, wielding the bat high above her head before bringing it down with a vengeance, clanging against their metal moldings. 

“I cannot allow this violence to continue,” a synth recited. It mimicked her movements with its right arm and brought down a powerful hit on her shoulder— the same one the Super Mutant had smacked just outside of Goodneighbor. 

“You sure you can’t allow this?” She screamed back. She chose to ignore the agony in her left shoulder. Pain was a biological message, after all. She could simply ignore the message. Leave it clogged in the letter box until it exploded. 

“You are damaging Institute property.”

“Deacon, what’s the Institute, by the way?” 

“I don’t think this is the time for a Commonwealth history lesson, boss.”

She nodded quickly in his direction before continuing on her rampage. She turned at the last second to meet the barrel of a gun skimming the skin between her eyes. She could feel the heat of it, fresh from the firefight, warming her forehead. A skeletal finger on the thing’s right hand moved for the trigger, but Deacon landed a steady hit right in its chest piece, successfully felling the last of the group.

“Thanks, Deacon.”

“Of course, what are partners for?”

It was then that she realized how heavy her breath was. Her lungs were burning, and her shoulder was starting to feel like it was on fire.

_That’s going to be a fun new bruise._

She had a little competition going with herself of how big a bruise she could get, and the most interesting places and shapes for bloody contusions. She vaguely remembered cannonball contests from her childhood, where the biggest splash won— this was just like that, only a little more violent. 

“Let me take a look at that shoulder.”

“No, no, I’m fine. We can keep moving. No need to stop on my account.”

“Hey, we take care of each other here. I know you’re used to being on your own, but so am I. Don’t let a messed up shoulder end up being the thing that does you in.”

_I’m only at 36% today,_ she wanted to say. _This shoulder isn’t going to end me._

But she couldn’t say it, because she wasn’t ready for Deacon to know she was a lunatic. She just had to let him pull the protective cap off a stimpak with his teeth and shove it into her arm. As soon as she had rolled out the stiffness, they moved on. 

Tommy Whispers was dead. They found him lying cold on the floor of the safe room, handgun falling limply from his left hand. She tucked the prototype into her chest-piece pocket as Deacon sat kneeled by his dead colleague, his eyes pressed shut in thought. His hands lifted the gun as if it were some sacred artifact, or as if with the movement of the still gun, a trap door would open beneath his feet. She was surprised when he stood and extended it towards her. 

He handed the gun to her with reverence, and for the first time, she swore she saw on his face a hint of sentiment. Before, he had been cool and standoffish, his clean and quick sense of humor addressing any emotion she thought he might be feeling. But now, with his comrade dead on the floor in front of him, she noted a twitch in his lip that gave something away. 

“Why give this to me?” She inquired slowly, as if speaking to a frightened child. Damned maternal instincts. 

“Look, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Railroad hasn’t been doing so hot as of late,” he began, and his sentiment shriveled instantly. His voice remained steady, as it always was— that low lilt of humor that tinted every word he spoke with enough charm to keep her from dwelling on the matter for too long. “And you— you’re not as useless as you think you are. When I was following you, I thought you might make it within one hundred feet of Goodneighbor and then get your head smashed by a Super Mutant. I didn’t expect you to befriend the Mayor, save the town, and become an actual certified superhero. So I started expecting more of you, and every time, you blew past my high expectations. I don’t know what was in the water pre-war, but you’re something else.”

_Something else._ Typical. Of course, even in his compliments, he was frustratingly vague and uncompromisingly witty. That was his entire personality type, and as much as she didn’t want to beg for validation, she wished he could force out something a little more specific than, “ _You’re something else.”_

“Thanks, Deeks.”

“So you’ve caught on to the nickname?”

“That’s what I was calling you already in my head. So you admit you were following me?”

“Ah-ha. Could you blame me? You crawl out of a vault after 200 years and kill a Deathclaw in the middle of the street, some heads are gonna turn.”

“Hmm.”

“Besides, that gun could keep you out of a lot of trouble. You can’t kill everything with a rusty baseball bat.”

“Speaking of killing things—“

“A really good way to start a sentence—“

“—we killed a whole lot of synths on the way here. What makes those synths any different than the ones you’re trying to save?”

“I’m sure you saw Glory when you were at Headquarters. Tall, dark, and a killing machine? She’s a synth.”

“She’s… a robot. The one with the mini-gun?”

If Glory could look so normal, so flesh and blood, how many other wastelanders had she met who had been synths as well? Nick Valentine was one, of that she could be sure, but was Ellie? Was Piper a synth, despite her ramblings in Publick Occurrences against the mayor? Was Hancock a ghoul-synth? A _ghynth_? 

_If he’s a ghynth, the Brotherhood of Steel is going to want his number._

“Glory looks just like me and you, except not quite as attractive as me, of course.” _Debatable._ “She can also make her own decisions. She dreams at night. She has wants and needs and hopes and dreams. Gen 3 synths are practically human. Gen 1s and 2s like the ones we saw in there? They’re all wires and protocols. They do what the Institute wants them to do, no questions asked.”

“And the Institute is…?”

“No one can really tell. You ask ten people that question, you’ll get ten different answers,” he replied, shifting uncomfortably and tapping his gun against his thigh. She realized that they were still standing above dead Tommy Whispers, and she could tell he was a little shaken, even if he didn’t want to admit it. His lips were pursed carefully in a bent line, and his nostrils slightly flared. 

“So what’s your answer?” She finally questioned as the heavy safe door shut behind them. “What do _you_ think the Institute is?”

“I think they’re trying to make the Commonwealth a better place, but in a really fucked up kind of way. They’re doing it on their terms, and their terms involve replacing innocent people with synth replicas, mass-killing ghouls, and creating Super Mutants to kill traders along roadsides. They think they’re getting rid of some kind of _disease_. They think the Commonwealth is infected with stupid and violent people, but they’re wrong. Most folks, I think, are good folks. They deserve a better world, but the Institute’s not going to be the one giving that to them.”

“Hmm.”

She pondered the thought, letting it roll around in her mind and collect the dust that had settled over her mind’s shelves. She had always pictured her brain as a storage unit, with musty bins lining the walls and collapsing shelves where she stored books filled with useless information. She stuck a new bookmark in her files on the Institute and moved on.

_Filed under: INSTITUTE; Section D, for Deacon’s Opinion._

“I’m a synth too, you know.”

She nearly dropped her bat, choking out a curt, “ _What?”_

“Yeah. And since you’re my partner in crime now, I think you should be the one to carry this around.”

He extended a folded scrap of paper in her direction, and she took it blankly, running her hands along the jagged edge to open it, but he stopped her.

“Don’t— don’t look at it yet. It’s my recall code. If you say aloud to me the things that are written on that paper, my memory will be wiped completely. I’ll go back to factory settings and probably either shut down or try to kill you.”

“So why do _I_ need this? When would I use this?” She wanted to hand it back, tell him that she didn’t want that kind of power, and let him handle his own factory settings, but he stared her straight in the face. She felt that she could feel his eyes on her, even through his sunglasses. 

“Just in case,” Deacon sighed somberly. “If we’re ever in a position where the Institute might try to kidnap me and harvest my brain for information on the Railroad, you have to use that code. It’ll make me lose every new memory I’ve made, but it will save the Railroad. Promise me you’ll use it.”

“Okay, okay, I will,” she pledged, though she couldn’t promise she had any real intentions of using it. Two days into their budding friendship, and he was already giving her what seemed to be the wasteland equivalent of nuclear launch codes. How could she be sure she wouldn’t say it by accident? Was it a word? Was it numbers and letters? If she started reciting the alphabet in random order, would he go stiff and fall on his face or start pointing his gun right at her? 

_Better look at it, to make sure._

As soon as his back was turned, she brushed aside her moral dilemma. If he could roundabout his way out of her _cut the bullshit_ order, she could read his little brainwash code. She flipped the little piece of paper open and read the recall code inside. 

_Bastard._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every day that we get closer to Halloween, I get more and more excited. I'll be sitting on my couch, eating candy in costume alone, but I think that's exactly what I want to be doing. I wish a very spooky and happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates it, and a very lovely weekend to those who don't. Much love to you all!! <3


	11. WASTELAND 101

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! I hope everyone had a very lovely Halloween!! I hope everyone has a lovely Sunday afternoon, and a peaceful week ahead. Love you all!! <3

_XI. WASTELAND 101_

“Actually, the scientific name for that is _Motherfucker Supreme,”_ Nora told him plainly, and he admired her remarkable skill to maintain a straight face under pressure. He turned the slip of paper around and shook his head doubtfully.

“No, this one is actually called a _Savage Deathclaw._ You can tell the difference between this one and a normal one because its talons are longer, its horns are curlier, and if you are close enough to notice either of those traits, you are probably already dead.”

He tucked the paper into his pocket and pulled out the next one.

They were on their way to Quincy, running a mission for Randolph Safehouse. Nora had been assigned all Randolph missions, but Desdemona had sent Deacon with her, at least for her first mission, just to make sure that Nora knew what she was doing. If this mission went well, Nora would be awarded full agent status, along with a cool nickname that she was already planning in her head. 

“ _Motherfucker Supreme_ is a cooler name for that,” she said as she took the next paper from his hands, squinting at the poorly-drawn Radscorpion he had sketched there. 

“Maybe _Motherfucker Supreme_ could be your agent codename.”

On their way to Quincy, Deacon had taken it upon himself to educate Nora about all the delightful creepy-crawlies that roamed the nuclear wastelands. She had already come up with names for them herself, and he had to admit that they were _excellent_ names. He only hoped that the pitiful renditions of the creatures that he had sketched on scrap pieces of paper were enough for her to identify them in real life.

Upon Nora’s return to HQ, Deacon had, of course, beefed up her resume with a little fibbing here and there, but she had denied all of his suggestions. Desdemona probably wouldn’t have bought them anyway, but he was nonetheless curious as to why Nora so adamantly denied carrying his limp body through the sewers and taking down a ten-foot-tall synth leader with her bare hands. 

It was a really good story, and he would have _loved_ to take credit for that.

“ _She would have believed it, you know,”_ he had said confidently as the two made their way into the hub. 

“ _Somehow, I doubt that.”_

“ _I was vouching for you, pal, why would you embarrass me like that?”_

She had turned towards him with a fleeting smile, rolling her eyes at his whining tone. She took a seat on the edge of a desk and accepted a cold water from Glory, who had wandered over to ask about their mission. 

“ _I have no reason to lie about my credentials.”_

And yeah, maybe that was true. She _didn’t_ have any reason to lie about her credentials, impressive as they were, but they could always be _more_ impressive. 

_If you’re already cool, why not try to be SUPER cool?_

“Deacon, I don’t know what this is. Is this a cat?” Nora questioned with a laugh as she waved the Radscorpion paper around in front of his face. “Maybe you should have let Carrington draw these.”

“That’s incredibly insulting. And it’s not a cat, it’s a Radscorpion. Cats are, somehow, the only normal animal around here. Except for Dogmeat. Where did you find that guy anyway?”

“At a gas station.”

As they came upon the Quincy ruins, it became alarmingly clear that the threat was not a standard raider gang. At least twenty Gunners milled about the area, toting their laser rifles self-importantly as they monitored the perimeter. Why the Gunners were setting up shop in an abandoned parking lot was beyond them, but whatever Randolph wanted, Randolph got. 

“How do we do this?” She questioned as her eyes followed a Gunner that roamed a little too close for comfort.

“We should go explosive. If we tag a couple frag grenades to one of those cars, all of them will blow.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know? Those pre-war cars are unstable. If you so much as look at one the wrong way, it’ll blow up everything within a 100 foot radius.”

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath, eye widening as she glared at an old red truck that sat nearby. “I put Shaun in the back seat of one of those things dozens of times.”

He glanced at her cautiously, scoping out the extent of concern he might ought to have for his new partner. He wasn’t entirely sure what kind of emotional state she was in, and that worried him. If she was going to be a proper agent, she needed to keep her head on straight. He couldn’t blame her, though— after all, he wasn’t sure what he would do if he had awoken from a 200 year nap to watch his son being kidnapped right in front of his eyes.

He was, however, _painfully_ aware of what she felt watching someone kill her husband right in front of her, and he was even more acutely aware of the fact that he hadn’t been able to so much as hold a glass of water without his hands shaking violently for at least a few months. 

He was surprised that she was able to maintain a steady aim, and even more, a steady mind. 

“You should do that, not me. I don’t trust myself with explosives,” she finally spoke as soon as the wandering Gunner was out of earshot.

“Why not?”

“I tried a molotov cocktail once and it was… too empowering.”

“Too empowering?”

“If I do it too much, I’ll go power crazy.”

“Fair enough.”

They had settled on a distraction— Nora would shoot a few errant shots towards the parking lot, and when the Gunners looked for the source, Deacon would plant the grenades while Nora was already on her way to fleeing the scene. 

It worked like a charm, and Deacon was starting to wonder if he and the new girl should work together more often. She was sharp, and despite his vow to be a lone wanderer for the remainder of his time at the Railroad, he was beginning to see the benefits of partnered travel. 

The journey, for one, was far lighter than it was alone. Instead of playing inane solitary games of _How-Many-Ghouls-Can-Fit-In-One-House-Oh-God-They’re-Coming-For-Me,_ Nora had made pleasant conversation the whole way, and she had indulged him in his proposition that he teach her the ways of the wasteland. 

As they made their way back north from Quincy, he weighed his options. After having been on two missions with her, she had proved her wit and her strength, but also her charm. Perhaps it was the lack of radiation in her teeth, but she had a sly kind of grin that made him feel like he had met his match. 

All of this was hypothetical, though— he wasn’t the _partnering_ type, and even if he did ask her to partner up, there was no guarantee that she would agree. 

_She wouldn’t want to get to know you, anyway, and she shouldn’t. If she knew what you did, what happened because of your shitty decisions, she would be disgusted. She would leave you on the roadside to get eaten by Mirelurks._

He pushed the thought out of his mind as he watched her pick up a rock that sat by the road and toss it into the river. 

“I was always shit at rock-skipping. One time, I tried to skip a rock across the little pond at the Boston Commons, and I threw it a little too far to the left and it smacked Nate right on the back of the head.”

Deacon stifled a laugh. He assumed that he shouldn’t be laughing. After all, it was a story about her late husband, and if he laughed, she would undoubtedly be upset. But when he looked at her, she was grinning ear to ear at the tale.

“He deserved it,” she continued. “I asked him to teach me how to skip rocks, and he told me that my arms were probably too weak to do it effectively. Judging from the knot he had on the back of his head, I’d say my arms are pretty strong.”

“Yeah? Did you have a lot of time to work out before the war?”

“Oh, sure. Scrubbing dishes gives you some nice muscles.”

“Huh, maybe I should try that sometime.”

“Are you usually the one who trains new agents?” She asked out of the blue, and he wondered what had prompted the question, but Nora had been thinking about asking it for most of the journey to Quincy and back. 

“To be honest with you, you’re our first new recruit in a while. You’d be surprised, but not many people are willing to risk their asses for Institute synths.”

“So why do you risk your ass to help Institute synths?”

He nearly stopped in his tracks. Sure, Nora had asked him plenty of questions about the Railroad and the Commonwealth in general, but this was the first question that breached the topic of his own motivations. 

“And why did you lie to me about being a synth?”

_Jesus Christ. Atom above. Are you there, God? It’s me, Deacon. I need you to wipe me off the face of the earth real quick. Can you be a pal and do that for me?_

But of course, Atom would spare him for at least another day, and why? Because the gods loved to watch Deacon suffer. He imagined Atom and Jesus and Zeus looking down at him, tossing popcorn at the back of his head as if he were a character in a horror movie and they _wanted_ him to be the first to die.

“That’s a story for another time,” he finally spoke concisely, praying that she would drop it. He should have known that she wouldn’t. She was remarkably persistent, and while that was an admirable trait in most situations, it had little to no benefit for him personally. 

“I want to be able to trust you, Deacon. I can’t do that if you’re going to lie to me, and if you’re going to tell me half-truths just to get me to stop asking questions. It might not be the way you operate, but if I’m going to have someone watching my back in a firefight, I want to know that they’re trustworthy.”

She knew she was overstepping. She knew that he was uncomfortable— this was made clear by the way he glared at his boots, shuffling through the dusty street and kicking up dirt with every step. She knew she was overstepping, but she didn’t care. 

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“That’s not a problem. That’s the whole point of friendship— getting to know each other. If you tell me things about you, then I _will_ know more about you. And I can tell you things about me, too. I guess you do kind of know me though, don’t you?” She asked, nicely enough, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was a little accusatory. “You followed me around, saw what I did.”

“Yeah, uh, sorry about that, but y’know— Railroad business.”

“It’s cool. It’s kind of nice not to have to go through a whole bunch of introductory business, though, since you already know so much about me. I just have to figure out what you’re all about.”

“Sure, sure,” he replied, though of course, he didn’t really mean it. There was something kind of sad about it, really, that he knew she would _try_ to get to know him, but that he would inevitably redirect her at every attempt. Whether or not she discovered his redirections were a different matter, but it would end the way it always had— he would tell the truth once in a blue moon, but scatter it so thinly among the lies that the two were imperceptible from one another. 

“I already kind of feel like I know you, though,” she remarked absentmindedly, and he paused. She, however, continued on casually, kicking a tin can down the roadside as she walked. “You know how you meet some people and you feel like you’ve been friends with them forever, even though you haven’t known them very long? I think maybe we were buddies in another life.”

“I was your milkman before the war. I slipped into the vault while no one was looking. My personal stash of milk kept my bones strong for 200 years.”

“Ah, right. That’s where I know you from.”

And she could have believed it, honestly. She could see it clearly in her head, the image of Deacon in a crisp white uniform and neatly pressed black bowtie ringing her doorbell and leaving a crate of 2% on the porch with a wink and a nod. He could have been anything, really. The mailman, her neighbor— hell, he could have been on the news, could have been a senator. He was certainly charming enough. 

But as familiar as his presence felt to her, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t know what made him _Deacon_. 

“I’ll figure you out, Deacon.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Could be. Doesn’t have to be. It all depends on how stubborn you want to be about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so happy that it is November now! October is lovely, but it felt incredibly long this year. I'm ready for the cold weather and the Christmas season. Much love to you all!! <3


	12. PARTNERS IN ORGANIZED CRIME

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Sorry about the delay for this chapter, but I haven't been able to tear my eyes away from the Associated Press the past week, and I'm sure that any of you who are from the US can certainly agree. Have you ever wanted to make mac & cheese, but you didn't want to wait for the water to boil, so you just ate the cheese packet that's in the box? No? Just me? That's what this chapter is about. I hope you enjoy! Love you all!! <3

_XII. PARTNERS IN ORGANIZED CRIME_

“Oh, _shit!”_ Nora yelled, the blue and yellow box already making her mouth water just by virtue of seeing it. “You guys still have _Blamco?_ No one told me that!”

She gestured vaguely to the box in hopes that her new friend would let her do what she needed to do. It had been a few weeks since their successful Switchboard run, and, on Deacon’s advice, Desdemona had agreed to induct a new agent. By that point, Nora felt morally equipped to handle her Railroad initiation. A mere matter of weeks ago, she had heard the word _synth_ for the first time, and it hadn’t meant a single thing to her. Now, she was joining a shady underground organization dedicated to saving them. 

She wanted to give the Railroad all that she had to offer, whatever that may be. Perhaps it was indeed a surge of righteous justice she felt for synths and synth-kind, but the nagging thought of her own morality still loomed dangerously in the back of her mind. She had been able to quell it for the most part, chalking it up to survival instinct. Kill or be killed, dog eat dog, all that cliche. But she couldn’t help but think that maybe joining the Railroad would help her better come to terms with the fact that she had taken not one, not two, but _innumerable_ lives at that point.

_Is this a good idea? Jury’s still out. But, it sure could be a hell of a lot of fun. And maybe one day, they’ll give me one of those cool coats._

She even had a certified Railroad mission partner, which Glory assured her was not standard procedure, and probably had something to do with Deacon’s compulsive need to join the action so he could lie about it later.

But Deacon was a good shot, and his jokes weren’t _always_ painful, so when he had asked her if she would be interested in teaming up, the idea had been attractive enough for her to agree. Besides— he _was_ growing on her. 

“ _Why not keep a good thing going?”_ Had been his exact words. 

Deacon’s sunglasses fell to his nose in amusement.

“Yeah, go ahead, go crazy.”

She ripped the box open excitedly and sought the magical silver packet that she knew was hiding amongst the dry elbows of pasta.

“This shit is so good,” she spoke, tearing the creased end of the packet, hoping and praying that it wasn’t molded or so irradiated that she couldn’t eat it. She still would eat it, of course, but she would die trying, and her prescience hadn’t cued her in on the fact that she might die that day from Outdated Blamco Mac & Cheese Exposure.

“The cheese?” He questioned with a scoff, looking down in the now discarded box at the dry noodles she had left behind. “What about… you know… the rest? That stuff’s just powder.”

And he was correct, of course, but it didn’t bother her. She had done this dozens, maybe hundreds of times from her youth up to adulthood. The cheese powder packets in Blamco boxes were manna from heaven, and who was she to tell Jesus to take his cheese powder and hit the road? 

_Cheezus,_ she thought errantly, storing the joke in her brain for another time. 

“When I was growing up, we would trade these like baseball cards. Do you know what baseball cards are? Anyway, we would trade them throughout the neighborhood, because if you pour all of the powder into your mouth at once and let it sit in there for a while, it would get solid and kind of creamy.”

“That’s… horrific.”

“It’s delicious, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to go into a cheese coma,” she spoke, tipping the silver package back towards her mouth and letting the orangey dust fall on her tongue. 

“Great. Great. A cheese coma. Now I get to be the one to tell Des that our brand-spanking-new agent overdosed on… cheese.”

“It’s not even real cheese,” Nora muttered bitterly, but the words came out jumbled and half-formed. 

At this, Deacon paused. His arms, long folded over the chest of his white t-shirt, tensed, and his shoulders seemed to hunch. His brows furrowed above the crest of his sunglasses, and his bottom lip drooped somewhat. He looked, much to Nora’s humor, like a pouting child. 

“What’s wrong, Deeks?” 

“What do you mean it’s not real cheese?”

“It’s factory-made. Back in the day, most things were so widely distributed, they had big factories to make everything. It’s cheeper to make fake cheese than to get the real stuff.”

“What… what did the real stuff taste like?”

“Not quite this. This is like… _intense_ cheese. This is cheese on drugs. Regular cheese was a little subtler, a little more refined.”

“Hmm.”

Her jaw loosened as the powder began to coagulate on her tongue, and she chuckled as his demeanor drooped. For all Deacon’s mystery and disguise, she had found him somewhat easy to read. It was his lips, more than anything. He was very expressive with his mouth, perhaps the result of extensive surgeries on the rest of his face. She wondered if his eyes were lively, as she assumed them to be, and exactly what shade of blue they were. She didn’t know for sure that they were blue at all, but she assumed they were. She _liked_ to assume they were. 

And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she liked playing guessing games about him, not just the color of his eyes, but what his real face might look like, or what his family was like, or his favorite song on the radio. 

And his real name. She thought about that more than she’d like to admit, but she couldn’t help the nagging curiosity in the pit of her gut. He didn’t know her real name, and she didn’t know his. That way, they were safe. Their true identities were kept locked away, but some selfish notion kept her wishing that she knew his name. 

Deacon was her _friend_ now. The prospect that she was coming down with a powerful case of Stockholm Syndrome came to mind several times since she had started really getting along with him, but she pushed it aside. She had, after all, been given a cool nickname just that afternoon with the approval of Desdemona. 

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you choose _Professor?”_

“I always wanted to teach. I didn’t get to go to college, much less get a master’s degree or a phd. My life was devoted to housekeeping and childrearing.”

“Bleak,” he murmured, and she hummed in appreciative agreement. Deacon had yet to look at her with those big sympathetic eyes she got from everyone else. She would accidentally say something tragic, and he would simply move on. Whether it was because he was emotionally stunted or because he understood her wish to keep her past casual, she didn’t know, but she was grateful nonetheless. 

Her mind returned to her side project, the little blinking blip on her pip-boy’s screen that denoted Fort Hagen, a seemingly abandoned military base to the far west, south of Sanctuary Hills. Dogmeat had tracked Kellogg’s scent all the way to the front door, but every entrance was blocked and the rooftops were lined with turrets. She needed to arm herself before she went back there. 

“What’s that?” Deacon inquired, taking her by surprise as he leaned over her shoulder to point at the screen. The proximity drove her wild— she was well aware how long it had been since she had a proper hug, and though Dogmeat was an excellent cuddler, she longed for the warmth of another human being. Sometimes, she had dreams about Deacon or Des or Glory or Piper or even Nick wrapping their arms around her and squeezing so tight her ribs cracked and burst her lungs wide open. She wanted to pull Deacon into a hug, but as their friendship progressed, she realized that he was definitively not the _hugging type._

“Fort Hagen.”

“Oh, I think I’ve seen that place. You thinking about making a teddy bear run?”

“No, there are no teddy bears in Fort Hagen.”

“So what _is_ in there?”

“An Institute mercenary.”

Deacon scoffed, “Ah, so that’s what you’ve been working on. You’ve been scouting out that bastard with the kid from Diamond City. You sure you want to take this guy on?”

She thought about it for a moment. Everyone else had simply wished her luck or offered their assistance, assuming that she was some kind of momma bear who had lost her cub. She wondered if Shaun was even still alive. If he was, was he in Fort Hagen? Was Kellogg even in there? A million different things could go wrong. She could end up dying alone on the pavement outside the fort, her lifeless body ripped full of bullets, chasing a lead that was never going anywhere. Deacon’s question gave her pause. 

“Do you want to come with me?” She finally asked. He was silent. She recalled what Glory had said about him— he was always looking for action, and always looking for fuel for his compulsive lying habit. 

_Of course he’s not interested in helping you with your little revenge fantasies,_ she thought bitterly. She didn’t want to believe that about him, but it was hard when he gave her no evidence to counter it.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” she eventually settled. “We’re Railroad partners. You don’t have to help me with my personal vendettas. It’s not safe, anyway.”

“I want to come with you.”

“What?”

Suddenly, his hand was on her shoulder, and she flinched so hard she nearly fell off the metal desk where they sat side by side. He laughed at her reaction as she settled herself under the weight of his hand. He had warm hands, and the stretch of his fingers across her skin settled pleasantly throughout her body. 

“That is, if the offer still stands, Professor. I’d like to tag along with you. It would be good to get out and do something that I don’t have to report to Des at the end of the day. What do you say, partner? You, me, Fort Hagen, a couple of stolen Brotherhood laser rifles? Could be fun.”

“Stolen Brotherhood laser rifles?”

“Say what you will about the Brotherhood, but their weapon modifications are sturdy. I’m not giving those shitheads any of my spare caps, though.”

“Something tells me you already have a pair of stolen Brotherhood laser rifles.”

He simply smiled and gave her a wink. She’d learned to recognize the way his eyebrows moved when he winked, but she was not yet an expert in his motivations. Always winking, always fibbing, always sending her wry smiles when he wanted her to fill in the blanks of whatever he’d just said. Being Deacon’s partner involved learning an entirely new language of gestures, because whatever language he spoke from his mouth was missing a great deal of substance or an outright lie.

“Alright, Deacon. This weekend. You bring the stolen Brotherhood laser rifles, I’ll bring the snacks.”

“That’s very motherly of you.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

Later that night, she found herself unable to sleep. The mattress she reserved for what could only be considered an _extended nap_ as opposed to an actual good night’s sleep was in the auxiliary hallway by the back entrance to HQ. She slept with a shelf nearby, stacked with a little pile of stimpaks, a moldy copy of _The History of Rome: Volume 3,_ and a stack of pill bottles Dr. Amari had given her for sleep. 

She hadn’t realized how mangled her sleep schedule had become until she fell asleep at a table outside the Dugout Inn in the middle of a lunch meeting with Nick. He had woken her up, practically carried her back to the agency, and forced her to at least _try_ to rest. 

She couldn’t rest. There was too much to do.

Preston had her watching at least five settlements at once, and the Abernathy family was counting on her to build an alarm system that would help keep out the persistent raiders from the radio tower nearby. She was in the middle of tracking down an escaped synth who had freaked out before he could reach the Railroad agent assigned to meet him, and was now lost in the woods outside Natick. And, of course, she was prepping her mission pack for her inevitable showdown with Kellogg or whatever bastard was holed up in Fort Hagen. 

The pills from Dr. Amari had helped at first, but she was either gaining a tolerance for them, or her anxiety was too powerful for them to work at all.

“Can’t sleep?” Deacon whispered, stepping carefully to avoid kicking Drummer Boy in his sleep. “Me neither.”

“I’m starting to wonder if these sleeping pills are placebos.” 

“Placebos?”

“Fake pills.”

“Why is there even a word for that?”

“I don’t know, I thought you were an expert on pre-war culture. You tell me.”

“I don’t know either, but it’s gotta be fucked up. Why can’t you sleep?”

She sighed and buried her head into her knees as she tucked them to her chest. Deacon watched her out of the corner of his eye. He had put his shades back on just to go and talk to her, so he hoped that something productive would come of the conversation.

“I’ve got too much to do. Every second that I spend sleeping feels selfish, like I’m taking time away from helping people. Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Your reason is a hell of a lot more noble than mine, I’ll say that,” he joked, paying mind to the way Drummer Boy was stirring in the corner. If a single agent was awoken by his wisecracks, he would get shit from everyone about it. “Mine’s not so much that I _can’t_ sleep.”

“Surely you’re not telling me that you don’t _want_ to sleep.”

“I _want_ to sleep, I don’t want to dream,” he amended with a steady gaze down at his shoes. This was the closest she had come to revealing a true emotion from him, to seeing what Deacon was like outside of his constructed face and performative lies. 

“Yeah? And what kind of things do you dream about?”

“Carrington turning into a Radroach and living in the walls of my house, haunting me forever.”

She laughed despite the frustration she felt at his answer. Of course, she hadn’t expected a drawn out soliloquy about the horrors of his childhood or the trauma he must’ve experienced growing up in the wasteland, but she had hoped for something at least resembling honesty. 

“You know, before the war, I owned this book that was supposed to tell you what all your dreams meant. It was called _Dreams: Unwaking Visions of our Past Lives._ ”

“Sounds delightfully… pseudoscientific.”

“Yeah, maybe. I didn’t quite believe everything that it said, but it had a good message.”

“And that was?”

“Dreams are weird, but if you assign meaning to them, even if it’s a little pseudoscientific, it sometimes makes you feel better about real life. You start to feel like you’re more aware of yourself, or that your subconscious is looking out for you. Also, there is no such thing as a _bad dream,_ if you’re doing it right. As long as it’s just a dream in the end, then it will all be alright.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Professor,” he said, standing from the dirty mattress with an unreadable expression on his face. “Goodnight, Nora.”

“Night, Deacon. Sweet dreams.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every dream's a good dream-- even awful dreams are good dreams, if you're doing it right.   
> When I'm not making David Bowie references in my writing, I'm making Mountain Goats references.   
> I hope everyone can release all of this week's tension and get a good night's sleep tonight. Much love to you all!! <3


	13. IF I TRY TO DIE, DON'T LET ME

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Thank you once again for the support you all have shown me as I continue publishing this work. I hope to maintain a relatively consistent schedule with posting the rest of it, but this month is when I'll be doing all of my big final projects for the semester, so it may be a few more days between chapters. Love you all!! <3

_XIII. IF I TRY TO DIE, DON’T LET ME_

If there was one thing that Nora had learned in her time in the wasteland, it was that getting shot _fucking hurt._ She had let out a pained yelp when it happened, meriting Deacon’s worried gaze on her, but she had brushed it off quickly. The damn synths were always shooting at her with their stupid blue laser pistols, despite the fact that she was working tirelessly to help their brethren escape the clutches of the Institute. It was rude and ungrateful, but she couldn’t seem to convince the Gen 1s and 2s of this. They just pointed more guns at her.

Fort Hagen was a winding mess of one death trap after the other. She thought they might have to camp for the night in the middle of their break-in, and she would have done it, had she thought they would both wake up alive the next morning. 

She wasn’t going to die that day, of course. She was at a steady 68%. It wasn’t a comfortable number, but it was a risk she was willing to take, given the circumstances. She never knew where Kellogg might be, and at the end of every narrow hall or winding corridor through the facility, she expected him to pop out and knock her over the head with a shock baton before she could get a good shot at him. 

His voice rang out mockingly over the intercom system, but she elected to ignore it, instead focusing on Deacon’s quips. His wry humor had become an odd comfort in their journeys. Every time she felt that one or more of her limbs was about to be torn off, Deacon would make some snide comment about how cool she would look with a metal arm, and her spirits lifted. 

He was growing on her, and she hoped that she was growing on him. She couldn’t put any real evidence to her notion that Deacon had formed some kind of emotional attachment to her, but she noted his mannerisms and his speech patterns and thought she could trace _some_ kind of sturdy relationship. 

_He’s not a monkey, you can’t study him in his natural habitat and write up a report about it. He’s Deacon— whatever that means._

She was nearly sure that she’d grown on him when he shoved her out of the way of a fragmentation mine without a second thought, only to find that it was faulty. She was grateful, but that didn’t stop her from giving him an earful about how he could have died.

“ _I knew it was faulty the whole time, boss. I’ve got the eyes of a hawk.”_

_“Deacon, I have no idea what kind of eyes you have, but you couldn’t possibly have known that. That was stupid.”_

_“What, saving your hide was stupid? Remind me not to do it next time.”_

_“Thank you, Deacon. Just… don’t do it again.”_

Now, her eyes scanned the floor endlessly for the tell-tale orange glow of a fragmentation mine, praying she could save Deacon from trying too hard to be a hero.

The closer she got to Kellogg, the more her heart rang faster and faster, beating in her ears as if it had moved from her chest right up into her skull cavity. Deacon, of course, had noticed this, but he was waiting to mention it until he was sure that it wouldn’t set her off.

She had been touchy all day, and understandably so, and none of his jokes had made her laugh the way they usually did. He found, to his own horror, that he missed the sound of her laugh and the ease with which she could shoot back a quip of her own. He missed the easy conversation that flowed between them as they traveled. He felt like he could tell her anything— he _wouldn’t_ tell her anything, of course, but he felt like he could.

In a different world, he could tell her anything. If he had lived in her kind little neighborhood before the war, he might have really been her best friend. He had a dream that he lived in Sanctuary Hills a few nights before their trip to Fort Hagen, thanks to her little talk about dreams. He cursed her for it. The dream was too nice, and he woke up wishing it had been real.

He had woken up in a plush bed, under a soft, dreary gray blanket in a bedroom with yellow-painted walls and a radio that had more than three channels on it. He loved Travis Miles, but the Capital Wasteland had a radio station that played classic rock, and that was more his speed. 

The muted red curtains on the walls were garish, but he wasn’t complaining. He hadn’t seen a fully intact curtain in his life. The carpets were soft and the sunlight was softer in his Sanctuary dream. 

He had pulled himself out of bed begrudgingly as the alarm clock rang and jittered on the nightstand. Wandering down the halls, he had to admit that his subconscious had an eye for detail. Family pictures on the walls, a guest bedroom with a floral comforter on the neatly made bed, a Mr. Handy named Chester who wore a bowler hat and a monocle. He was really enjoying his little fantasy world. 

Nora sat calmly at the breakfast table, absentmindedly sipping on a cup of coffee as she flicked through the newspaper— the headlines were gibberish in his mind’s eye, but they didn’t seem to be worrying her. She wore a pair of checkered pajama pants that were much too long for her legs, and too wide to suit her frame, as was her t-shirt. He found the whole picture much too endearing. 

When she had asked if his dreams were getting any better, he had told her only that he had dreamed of a little house in Sanctuary Hills. He didn’t dare say a word about her presence at his table, or the implication that they were married in this little house. It set his stomach turning to even think about it, so he kept it in the most tightly sealed parts of his memory. 

However, he pictured the Nora at the breakfast table as he walked behind her into the depths of Fort Hagen, desperately wishing away the furrow of her brow and the stiff set of her lips. She was agitated, and a little too reckless. 

If she was going to best an Institute mercenary, she was going to have to get her mind right.

They approached the hefty automatic door that would be their final barrier between them and Kellogg, and Nora’s expression was growing more pained by the second. As confident as she was in her inner death metric, she could not shake the feeling that something terrible would happen.

What if Kellogg was holding Shaun hostage, waiting for her to enter the room so he could blow the child’s head clean off? What if she walked in there guns-a-blazing, and no one was in there but a few ghouls and a Radroach? What if she waltzed in only to find that standing in the middle of the room was not Kellogg, but Nate, holding their baby and begging her to come home to them? What if she woke up from a seemingly endless dream, and she was back in her house in Sanctuary, and Shaun was wailing at 3 AM?

What if she lived, but Kellogg shot Deacon right between the eyes, and she had to leave him there on the cold stone floor, blood flowering out around his head like a halo in an old picture of a saint? What if the first time she saw his eyes, they were blank and lifeless and staring up at the pitched ceilings, unblinking and unseeing? 

She tried to push his cold corpse from her mind, but she couldn’t. 

“Deacon, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything,” he replied, with no time to think of what the request might be. His quickness shocked her, but she hadn’t the mental capacity to assess the meaning of it. 

“I need you to stay out here. I need to go in there alone.”

He pondered the idea for a moment, a sour expression twisting his features, before saying, “Nora, I know that you feel like you want to avenge your past or something, but this guy’s really dangerous. It would help to have backup in there.”

“It’s not about vengeance, it’s about protection. I can’t let you die on this mission. Promise me you’ll stay out of that room, no matter what happens. If the fighting stops, and I don’t come back out, go back to HQ.”

“I came here not just to keep an eye on you, but because you’re my partner,” he persisted. She noted with interest how he strategically maintained his distance from the word _friend_. “If you’re going down in there, I’ll go down too.”

“But there’s no reason for you to die, Deacon. Please. This is my mission, and I’m grateful that you agreed to come with me, but this is the part I need to do alone. Promise me.”

“Fine, boss. I promise. As long as you promise me that you won’t die in there. There are no Blamco Cheese Powder Packets in the pits of hell.”

“Rude of you to assume that I’m going to hell.”

“You could go to heaven if you let me come in there with you.”

“Hell it is, then.”

He sighed deeply as she turned on heel and began walking calmly towards the door at the far end of the room. The locking mechanism clicked ominously before the door swung open. He stopped her in the doorway.

“Wait, Nora—“

“Not having second thoughts, are you, Deeks—“

He interrupted her by forcefully pulling her into a tight embrace, pushing his hands into her back to pull her as close as he could. It was quick, but it felt like it might have lasted for an hour or so, and every single point of contact felt undeniably warm and welcome. His hands had splayed warmly across her back, his chin rested firmly in the crook of her neck. He was warm. He was solid. Most importantly, he was human, and he was Deacon. 

“See you in hell, Professor.”

With a wink, she walked through the door to meet Kellogg.

He was not holding her child hostage, and he was not secretly her dead husband, and this was not a dream. It was Kellogg, really and truly, and he approached her with his hands in the air. 

“Not surrendering already, are you?” She called, tucking her laser rifle closer to her chest. He might be confident enough to raise his hands, but she was taking no chances. 

“C’mon, we can talk this out. You’ve done well to make it this far. I’m sure you have some questions you’ve been itching to ask me.”

As much as she wanted to blow his head off, he was right. It would be stupid of her to kill him right off the bat, or at least _try_ to kill him. She figured that he couldn’t have made a name for himself if he could be killed with one shot. 

“Where’s my son, Kellogg? What have you done with Shaun?” She labored to keep her voice measured, but there was a tell-tale waver that gave her away. 

“He’s with someone who will protect him. Someone who will take care of him. He’s with the Institute.”

“And how do I get to the Institute?”

He laughed at the brashness of her question, and she suddenly felt very stupid. How could she think that the Institute was like any other building, with a front door and a lobby and a secretary at the front desk? It became immanently clear that entering the Institute would require more than a location. 

“Even if I were to tell you, you still couldn’t get there. And you don’t want to get there. The things that go on in the Institute are beyond you, lady, and the quicker you learn that, the better chance of living past 30 you’ll have.”

“You bastard motherfucker, tell me how to get in before I rip your lungs out with my bare hands. I’ll kill you and eat you raw, you sack of shit. _Tell me how to find it.”_

“I guess there was no other way to end this, huh? You, a grieving mother missing her child. Me, a professional killer. Would you like to take the first shot, or shall I?”

“Last chance, Kellogg. Tell me, and you might leave here alive.”

“Alright. Let’s do this. Are you ready?”

“ _Fuck you.”_

If she were asked later who took the first shot, she could say for _certain_ that it wasn’t Kellogg. As soon as he postured his pistol to shoot, she had already begun blasting away at the synth bodyguards that had sprung into action at his signal. 

_Not fair, I left my bodyguard outside._

Her mind wandered to Deacon for a split second, which was all the time allowed for her mind to wander in the midst of the firefight, and she hoped desperately that he was already on his way back to Railroad HQ, forgetting that the whole affair ever happened. 

With another synth down, she turned her sights on Kellogg. He was cloaking himself like a goddamn coward, but she could see the rubble around his feet shift as he moved behind a partition. She ducked behind a cracked computer and shot at his figure across the room, landing a few shots on him. She heard a synth crash to the ground behind her, its metal pieces clanging to the floor, but she paid it no mind. She had her sight set on Kellogg, and she wasn’t looking away until he was dead. 

His stealth was wearing off. She saw the collar on his jacket, the tip of his head, the end of his left shoe. If she could last a few more moments, she could lock onto him properly, no disguises hiding either of them. As his torso came properly into view, she watched his head turn to her left, gazing toward the door through which she’d come. 

_Was he thinking of running? Was she doing better than she thought?_

Perhaps, in her blind shooting, she had hit him somewhere vital. There was a growing pool of blood on the floor below his figure, but he wasn’t moving towards the door. He was shifting his weight. His body turned towards the opposite side of the room. He was aiming at someone— someone that wasn’t her. 

Without a second thought, she lunged forward and threw her body across the staircase to block the line of his pistol. The world went silent. Everything happened in slow motion. Kellogg’s gun recoiled, though his face remained expressionless. Her ribs hit the stairs first, undoubtedly making a cracking sound that she couldn’t hear above the blood rushing through her head, then the rest of her body followed, crumpling against the angled plane of the staircase. 

Oh, she was certainly dead. That 68% had felt fine at first, but now it was flashing before her eyes. In the midst of her dying moments, she pulled her rifle up to aim one last shot at Kellogg. He fell face first to the floor, unmoving, and she smiled before her vision went dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm always a sucker for one person taking the hit for their friend-- it's a trope that I'll never get tired of. November seems to be going pretty quickly compared to October. I hope that all of you are having a lovely November, and that you find the motivation you need to complete whatever it is you want to do this month. Much love to you all!! <3


	14. NOT IF I KILL YOU FIRST!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! Thank you again for the nice comments you've left me!! I've always thought that Deacon and Sturges would be good friends. If Deacon actually liked the Minutemen, I think they'd get along. I hope you all enjoy this chapter!! Love you all!! <3

_XIV. NOT IF I KILL YOU FIRST!_

He watched her fall to the ground, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Kellogg was already dead, but Deacon wouldn’t have even worried about it if he hadn’t been. He was too busy fluctuating between screaming his head off and pleading in desperate, hushed tones with her to stay alive. 

“C’mon, Nora, don’t die on me, boss. You can still find Shaun, I’ll help you look past the ends of the earth to find him, if you want. Go to _hell, Kellogg!”_ He let out a strained yell at the dead man’s body lying adjacent to Nora’s. 

He was going to carry her out of that place. He was going to drag her back to the Railroad, and he was going to send her off right. He would avenge her death. Hell, he would find Shaun and raise the kid himself if he had to. 

Of all the people wandering the putrid grounds of the wasteland, Nora deserved to die the least among them. He should have taken the shot. He should have stayed outside the door, just like she said. He had wanted to _save_ her. 

_I had to go and try to be a fucking hero,_ he thought as his throat closed up. He hadn’t cried in some time, and it was coming on quick. If he didn’t move then, he wouldn’t ever leave the spot. _Or, you could check her pulse, you fucking imbecile._

Hours later, he was pacing the linoleum floors of the former Hawthorne home in Sanctuary. He remembered her talking about Natalie Hawthorne, her neighbor and best friend, her only solace in the eerily perfect neighborhood. He supposed it was fitting now that Nora was lying bleeding out on death’s doorstep that she would be laid to rest on Natalie Hawthorne’s ripped up mattress. 

Sanctuary Hills was the closest place to go, and he had scooped Nora up in his arms and carried her there himself, keeping one eye on the shallow intakes of breath that registered as little flutterings of her chest, and keeping the other eye on the road. If he ran into Gunners now, he would be a goner. 

_What, you can’t carry a corpse through a wall of gunfire without dying? Pussy,_ the Nora in his head jested. 

He had started towards her old house, but her robot butler had met him halfway.

“She doesn’t reside there, Master Deacon.”

_Of course, idiot. Stupid, insensitive idiot._

What kind of partner would he be if he let her die in the house she had hated so much? She’d _definitely_ haunt him after that. And since he lived and worked out of an old crypt, he was ripe for the haunting. 

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Sturges flung the bedroom door open, announcing that she was stable, for now. Deacon had wanted to stay with her every second, like some kind of lost puppy, but he had acquiesced to letting Sturges work his magic. If a stimpak couldn’t cover it, Deacon didn’t know how to fix it, and the gasping ring of blood that was blooming across Nora’s shirt told him that it was going to take more than a stimpak to save her.

“She’s awake, but she ain’t doin’ so hot,” Sturges remarked as he wrung his hands on a greasy dishrag. His hands were terrifyingly wet with Nora’s blood. “You can go in there, but don’t jostle her or anything. Not that I think you were goin’ in there with the express intention of jostlin’ her, but I don’t know what your intentions are. Just be careful, okay?”

Halfway through Sturges’s rambling, Deacon had already pushed past him into the bedroom. Nora would have called Sturges’s perpetual friendliness _southern charm,_ whatever that meant, but to Deacon, it was valuable seconds of his time wasted that he could have been using to stare helplessly at Nora lying prostrate on the bed. 

“Howdy, partner,” she whimpered, her body crumbling at the prospect of a single cough. The bleeding had stopped, but there was a frightening line of blackening red that ran across her midriff under her wide bandage. 

He took a seat by the bed, planted his elbows into the mattress, leaned his head into his palms, and simply looked at her. He hoped she felt uncomfortable under his gaze. He nearly took off his sunglasses to emphasize just how disappointed he was, but he couldn’t move, because she was looking up at him all glassy-eyed and weak. He couldn’t be mad at her, at least not right then.

“Boss, why the _fuck_ would you do something like that?”

She turned over laboriously like a worm in the dirt, all twisting and restless— but it felt good, this restlessness. It felt sticky and keen but familiar, almost pleasant, in a way. The way his eyes narrowed to scrutinize her behavior, the way his lip quirked in thought. She was in the hot seat, but she wasn’t jonesing to get out of it. In fact, she liked the attention.

“I couldn’t let anyone else kill you before I got the chance,” she finally intoned, her voice mild but still sharp with wit and humor. She only had a few more quips left in her before she fell into a drug-induced nap.

“And how do _you_ plan on killing me?”

“Not with a gun, that’s for sure. Blasé.” 

“You could have died,” he insisted, his sunglasses falling to the tip of his nose. This might have been an involuntary response to the way he kept shaking his head passionately, but it could have been calculated. She didn’t take the near sight of his true eyes lightly, and perhaps he thought this might force some understanding into her. 

“But I didn’t.” Cliche, but true. 

“You didn’t know that.”

“Oh, but I did,” she exclaimed, wagging her finger at him in a motion that ultimately made her wince, much to Deacon’s dismay. “I only had a 68% chance of dying yesterday, and today it’s only 24%.”

As her impassioned claims ebbed into silent grimacing, Deacon’s eyebrow raised. He smiled, and she knew she had won, but he wasn’t going to make her victory lap easy. 

She had never even thought about telling someone about her prescience. She could never find the words in her own head to describe it. She had never even whispered silly words about it over Shaun’s tiny head as he slept under his gently twinkling mobile. But she was about to tell it to Deacon, a man who may well have lied about every single thing she thought she knew about him. But why the hell shouldn’t she? Her life was already weird enough, there was no reason to preserve any perceived dignity she thought she still might have. 

“Deacon, would you believe me if I told you that every single morning, I wake up knowing exactly how likely I am to die?” She finally asked. Nora was now reserved. The hesitant tapping of a gentle rain on the sill was the only soundtrack to their conversation. 

“I would believe anything you tell me at this point,” he answered simply, and for once, she was fully aware that he was not lying. His eyes were set straight forward, his nose downturned, and his lips at rest in a small sloped line. “You haven’t given me any reason not to believe you. So tell me something. The day the bombs fell, how likely were you to die?”

“15%.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“But here’s the thing, Deeks. My stupid party trick told me that I wasn’t going to die in there, but I told you to stay out, because I didn’t want _you_ to die in there. _”_

Now it was Deacon’s turn to feel the pressure of her gaze. He wiggled in his seat as he suddenly became increasingly uncomfortable in every possible position. 

_Damned pre-war chairs. No lumbar support._

_“_ How was I supposed to know that you’re a very specific fortune-teller? I thought… I thought maybe I could help you,” his argument weakened. 

Had her eyes always been that pretty? Had she always had that delicate, knowing smile, and had his heart always fluttered just at the sight of it? He was just… happy to see her alive, he supposed. 

“Thank you, Deacon. Truly, thank you. I know that your intentions were good. Just… next time I tell you to back off, _back off.”_ Her voice was stern but not harsh. As her eyelids weighted themselves shut, he watched her shamelessly. Later, he would admonish himself for the feelings he was inevitably going to have to come to terms with, but for now, he would just watch over her. 

Her nose twitched, and he wondered about the kinds of things she dreamed about. He wondered if she ever woke up in the same dream house that he did, if she ever pulled herself out of bed and walked into the kitchen to find him sitting at the table, reading the paper. 

_Don’t even think about it, Deeks,_ he chastised himself. _When you’re asleep, you can’t control what you see in your dreams. When you’re awake, you’d best watch yourself before you get too attached to some annoyingly impulsive, disgustingly honest single mom._

When she was up to the journey, they’d trek back to Railroad HQ, probably taking a stop to rest at Diamond City and Goodneighbor on the way. Christ, Nick and Hancock were going to kill him. They had both assumed _fatherly_ positions in her life, and she had nearly died on his watch. 

He could picture the two of them, her ghoul and synth dads respectively, staring at him from the living room of their house saying, “Have her back by 10 PM, young man,” or some other cinematic cliche. Except that the living room would be the Old State House, and Hancock would be reaching for his knife and staring into his soul with his coal-black eyes. 

“You sleepin’ here tonight?”

“Christ’s sake, Sturge,” Deacon whispered. For someone who considered himself the Commonwealth’s greatest spy, Sturges had managed to make Deacon nearly piss his pants at least twice that day. “Yeah, I’m sleeping here.”

“Alright, buddy. Let me know if she starts actin’ funny.”

“Thanks.”

Nora had heard the whole exchange, and she had to bite her cheek to keep from smiling big enough for Deacon to notice. She had been nearly asleep, true, but she had fought off the encroaching haze until she could hear if Deacon would say anything to her near lifeless body.

_Dramatic, I know. But how else am I supposed to prove that Deacon cares about people more than he lets on?_

“Are you… awake?” He questioned. 

“ _Shit.”_

_“_ I swear to Atom, Professor, if you don’t pass away in the night, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Aw, just when I thought we were bonding. Tell me something, Deacon.”

He folded his arms and rested his head on top, his eyes steady on hers as he spoke, “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me anything. I want to know something about you, anything, and I want it to be the god-honest truth. Your favorite color, your middle name, your favorite memory from being in the Railroad. Just tell me something. Please.”

“Well, my favorite color is purple, for starters,” he began, picking the easiest question first. This would be painful, but likely not as painful as a gunshot wound, so he felt that he owed it to her. “Have I ever told you about how I single-handedly founded the Railroad?”

“ _Deacon.”_

“How is it that you can always tell when I’m lying?”

She smiled a warm smile that reached her eyes. He noticed that she had a single dimple on her right cheek. There was not a single thing, he thought, that was _not_ charming about her. 

“Because I know you. And that’s okay. I know that you’re terrified at the prospect of being known, but you can trust me with the knowing. I’ll keep your secrets and only make fun of you a little bit. Now, tell me a true story.”

“I lived in the Capital Wasteland for a little while. It’s nice there— as nice as the post-nuclear world can be, you know. They’ve got five different radio stations. Classical, country, one that’s only in Spanish. There’s a station that plays music like the kind that’s on Diamond City Radio, and then there’s my favorite— Capital Rock, the Wasteland’s #1 place for classic rock.”

Her wavering eyes lit up as she gasped, “Really? Oh, man, you don’t know how long I searched for one of those. I wandered around to random cities for a while, listening to the static for hours on end, and there was _nothing._ Did they play Bowie?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Bowie was on all the time. Did you… listen to that kind of thing back in the day?”

“All day while Nate was at work, I’d help Codsworth around the house, and we would listen to records. I had a record player stashed away in the closet, and I’d put on _Ziggy Stardust_ until my ears bled and the neighbors complained.”

“Well then, we’ll have to take a trip to the Capital Wasteland sometime,” he pledged with his whole chest and every intention to make good on that promise. The light in her eyes was enough to make him crawl on his hands and knees to the ends of the earth— if the Brotherhood had promised him _Hunky Dory_ on vinyl, he would’ve signed on in a heartbeat. 

“Deacon, you’re a really good friend.”

“Nora, I could say the same about you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this as an excuse to take a little break from writing papers for school-- staring at pictures of 4000 year old terracotta pipes wears on your mind after a while, but it's ultimately fulfilling work. I hope everyone is doing well! It's mid-November, and I already have a Christmas tree up, because I needed some holiday cheer. I hope you all have a lovely week, and that you remember to treat yourself well. Much love to you all!! <3


	15. THE SHROUD TAKES DIAMOND CITY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends!! First of all, thank you for the comments AND critiques from last chapter-- I have definitely taken those into account during my editing process, and I hope that I can rectify some of that for you. Second of all, this now marks the halfway point for this story, and I'm so glad to have you all along for the ride. I have always thought that Piper would be an incredible friend to have-- so kind and passionate. I hope you all enjoy this chapter!! Love you all!! <3

_XV. THE SHROUD TAKES DIAMOND CITY_

She loosened her tie with a haphazard jerk, nearly pulling it taut enough to choke herself. She cursed under her breath. 

“Wow, smooth move, Shroud. You need help?” Piper joked as she stood up from her typewriter.

“You know, it might surprise you, but ties weren’t a big part of my regular wardrobe 200 years ago. Mainly stuck to dresses and heels, not full suits of disguise armor.”

“No? Nate didn’t send you on incredibly dangerous missions to hunt down drug lords in the streets of a crime-based city?”

“Now, I wouldn’t call Goodneighbor totally _crime-based_.”

“The mayor murdered a guy two seconds after you walked through the door.”

“Okay. I’ll abide by that. But no, Nate didn’t send me on _any_ missions except to the grocery store for bread and milk. I didn’t have to fight a _single_ person on the way, would you believe it?”

“That part does sound nice. And, hey, at least you look good in the costume.”

“It’s not a costume, Pipes, it’s my alter ego. It’s a secret identity.”

“It’s a costume. You literally stole it from a comic shop.”

“Yeah, but I had to fight a goddamn Glowing One to get it. That makes it special. I had never seen a Glowing One before. I didn’t even know it was called that— I just called it a Nasty Glowing Bitch.”

“Okay, fine, it’s not a costume. My compliment still stands, though.”

“Thank you,” she settled, tugging at the buttons on her now wrinkled dress shirt. “Maybe you could do an article on the Silver Shroud, huh? Let everyone know that there’s a vigilante out there kicking ass and taking names. Travis already talked about me on his radio show, maybe the paper could show me some love.”

“Oh, getting cocky, Blue? Just because every settlement in the Commonwealth decides they need your help, you think you’re some kind of hero?”

“Maybe I am, Pipes,” she returned lazily, with every intention of the statement being a joke, but Piper looked over her with a peculiar look in her eyes, as if she were tabulating a winning story at that very moment.

“Yeah, maybe you are. Maybe you are.”

Nora settled into the couch with a sigh, letting her bones settle properly after a hard day’s work of running errands for the people of Diamond City. Abbot had needed a fresh can of green paint, Sheffield had needed, of all things, a bottle of Nuka-Cola, Moe Cronin had put in a request for some baseball memorabilia. When she had handed him the goods, he had gone into three separate and wildly inaccurate accounts about the game’s structure. 

_Baseball to the death? Now that’s a sport I can get behind._

She made a mental note of it to tell Deacon every word Cronin had said as soon as she saw him next. He would really get a kick out of that.

Desdemona had given her a few days off. After nearly dying at Fort Hagen and taking something akin to an acid trip through Kellogg’s brain via Nick Valentine, it was the least she could do. In a few days, Nora would be gearing up to head into the Glowing Sea. 

She couldn’t wait. She hadn’t wanted to take the break, begging instead to get a head start on her next mission. Even Deacon was wary of this proposition, but Nora had pleaded with her fellow agents. 

“ _The Glowing Sea? That’s the coolest shit I’ve ever heard of!”_

_“Yeah, boss, and if you’re not careful, you’ll come out of there glowing yourself.”_

_“Don’t threaten me with a good time, Deeks.”_

Piper’s prior words to her had crossed her mind, how she had ignorance as a superpower, but she brushed it aside. Something that sounded as poetic as the _Glowing Sea_ was a place of adventure, and she was going to seek it out if it killed her.

She had elected to take her _worker’s compensation_ leave in Diamond City, where she could spend her nights laughing with Piper and having lunches with Nick Valentine at the Dugout. Her intentions had been good in coming to Diamond City— she was going to relax, get some good sleep, and make sure that she was physically repaired enough to make the trek down south. 

This, of course, didn’t happen. She had discovered the message board nearby the agency and had spent several days taking care of odds and ends for the residents of Diamond City. When she had come back into the Publick Occurrences office dripping head to toe in sludgy water, Piper had nearly screamed. 

“ _Christ, Blue, I thought you were a Mirelurk!”_

_“I helped Sheng clean out the water supply. Your tap water should be safe now. Well, safer than it was. I still wouldn’t call it safe.”_

Needless to say, Piper was _not_ happy to hear that her friend had nearly died at Fort Hagen.

“Blue, you’ve got to stop trying to save everyone. I get it, and it’s super noble, but it’s also kind of stupid.”

“I’m not trying to save _everyone._ Hell, I let that Pickman guy go after I scoped out his place for Hancock.”

“Pickman? Of the Pickman Gallery? The guy who kills raiders and uses their guts for art? Blue, why the hell did you let him go?”

She suddenly felt sheepish about the whole affair, but at the time, it had seemed perfectly reasonable to let the guy go. She had killed at least thirty raiders on her way into his house. Sure, she wasn’t harvesting their blood for her disturbing artwork, but she wasn’t _helping_ them in any way. 

“Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have let him _go,_ but he gave me a cool knife! Look, the way I see it is this: Pickman kills raiders and… _recycles_ their body parts for art that no one but him is going to see. I kill raiders and then report it to Preston Garvey so he can send me off to kill more raiders. If Pickman gets a few out of the way for me, who am I to stop him?”

“…Fair point, Blue. But my other point still stands. I’m not letting you do anything else for anyone in this city for the duration of your stay here. You have to either chill here with me or hang out with Nicky. Those are your rules.”

Her head hit the couch cushions with a dull _thud._ Yes, she was exhausted. Everything Piper was saying was perfectly logical, but the thought of sitting still for more than thirty minutes made her palms sweaty and her head hurt. She had to do _something_.

“You’re right,” Nora finally huffed. She focused her attention on what was happening in the room, instead of what people might need from her on the streets. It was nearly dinner time, and Piper was pulling various cans out of cabinets, sipping absentmindedly from a Nuka-Cola bottle that Nora had brought in from her earlier task for Sheffield. Nat was sitting contentedly at the dining table with a notepad and pen sat in front of her. 

Nat liked to draw up her own news stories— mostly little tales about what the kids of Diamond City had gotten up to. Nora read every single one of them with rapt attention. She was still waiting on the daring conclusion to the epic tale of how three Diamond City youngsters had all heroically agreed to hunt down a Bloatfly for some scientists in town. 

She allowed herself to wonder, if only for a moment, whether Shaun might get along with them. Shaun was older now. She had seen him in Kellogg’s memories, and he wasn’t at all the way she had known him before.

Of course, she had never really _known_ him. He had been a baby the last time she had seen him, but she had, on occasion, _pretended_ to know him, know that he was a nice young man with good manners and an interest in… baseball? Electronics? Coin collecting? He could be anyone. 

When she had first come out of the vault, she had been feeling a little too sorry for herself to worry so much about Shaun— a thing she regretted quite a bit— but she realized now that he had lost just as much life as she had, and he had lost several incredibly precious years. All of the things he could have learned when his mind was so young and impressionable— kindness, empathy, gentleness. She had wanted to teach him those things. Now, he was in the hands of the Institute, and who could possibly know what they had taught him? 

_That_ was why she had to keep him in a box, tucked away on a shelf in her brain. She could chase the _concept_ of Shaun, but she could not think of him for too long. Instead, she sought out every distress beacon, every needy settlement, and used them to replace her great need to find her son. 

“I swear to god, Pipes, it’s some kind of… _instinct._ I can’t stop trying to fix everything, take care of everyone,” she swore in a huff, lowering her aching neck to rest on the crest of the rugged red couch. 

“It’s ‘cause you’re a mom,” Nat intoned playfully as she poured herself a glass of water at the dining table. Piper shot her a glare, worried about Nora’s _stingy_ relationship with motherhood, but Nora simply chuckled and nodded. 

“You’re probably right, Nat. It’s that _maternal instinct_ my mother-in-law always told me I would grow into. Except it’s happening now, 200 years too late.”

“Is that why you hang out with that bald guy so much? He kind of looks like a baby.”

Nora froze, her eyes glaring wide open as Piper nearly spat out her cola in shocked laughter. 

“Yeah, Nora,” Piper joined in the hazing. “Is that why you hang out with that bald guy so much? You want to, uh— fix him?”

“Sure. Lay your beautiful bald head on my shoulder, and let me make you emotionally available all of a sudden. You fucking egg.”

“Do you want me to write an expose about him? _Local Drifter Refuses To Feel One Single Emotion, Romantically Confuses His Travel Partner._ ”

“Ha-ha, very funny, Pipes. It’s not even romantic, he’s just—“

“It’s not? So when he carried you in his arms all the way to Sanctuary Hills, that wasn’t romantic?”

“No, I was _dying!_ I would do the same for you, and we’re not in love. We’re just close friends. That’s what close friends do. But the thing is, he won’t even admit that we’re close friends. He refuses to even say the word _friends_.”

Piper gave her friend a sympathetic glance as the three all sat down to eat. Piper chastised Nat for having her notebook at the dinner table, and Nat refuted this with the fact that Piper had a notebook with her _all the time_ , but Nora’s mind was a million miles away— or, however many miles away the Old North Church was.

She had thought about Deacon during her time off. It was hard not to, after all. After a good month or so of traveling together, she had thought that perhaps a break from his company would do her some good, but she couldn’t help missing him at least a little bit. Or, a lot. 

Was he handsome? 

She couldn’t tell. She could see most of his face outside the bounds of his sunglasses, but she hadn’t taken the time to sit down and really think about his appearance. Apparently, his current face was not the one he had always had, which was something she had to take into consideration. 

_Did Dr. Sun do the operation? If I went down to the clinic right now, would Sun be able to show me a picture of the old Deacon?_

She didn’t even know how old he was. Judging by what she knew about him, which altogether wasn’t much, she would estimate that he was in his thirties, no more than ten years older than her, if even that. 

What was his real name? When was his birthday? Did she find him attractive? 

She let the questions keep rolling through her mind, not allowing any of them to stay for long enough for her to find answers, as she picked at the food on her plate. 

“Piper, do people around here usually celebrate birthdays?” She asked out of the blue. Surely, celebrating birthdays was the last thing on anyone’s mind, what with the desolation and constant danger around them all the time. How can you worry about celebrating when you can’t walk outside your own house without hearing gunshots in the distance?

“Depends on the person, I guess,” Piper responded with a curious expression on her face. 

“We celebrate my birthday every year!” Nat added excitedly. “We celebrate Piper’s, too. Just the two of us, usually. Sometimes Nick and Ellie come over, if they’re not busy.”

“It’s a small gathering, but it’s nice to celebrate _something._ Why do you ask, Blue?”

“I think tomorrow is my birthday.”

Piper’s fork clattered to the table with a resounding _clang_ , and Nat immediately began chittering excitedly about the _huge party_ they could have, but Nora was hardly listening. She was staring at the date on her pip-boy, letting the neon green numbers blur in her vision until they were nothing but digital blobs. 

She resurfaced to reality when Piper leapt from the table and pulled on her signature red coat. She hadn’t even finished chewing her last bite of supper before she was near sprinting straight for the door, her cap left hanging idly on the coat rack. 

“Piper, where are you going?” Nora called as Piper frantically threw her bag over her shoulder.

“Party planning!”

“I thought you just said that birthdays were small gatherings?”

“Yeah, for us. You’re the _Silver Shroud,_ defender of the Commonwealth! Do you know how indebted everyone is to you? You don’t, because you run around all day doing everyone’s work for them. The _whole city_ is coming to your birthday party tomorrow, Blue, so get ready!”

“Party!” Nat yelled, standing from her chair and dancing around the kitchen area with her hands in the air and her eyes closed in glee. She had composed a quick little tune about the whole affair, singing under her breath, “ _We’re gonna have a birthday party, a birthday party, a birthday party!”_

Despite the chaos of the moment, Nora felt an incredible and incomparable sense of peace about the whole thing. She smiled. 

Yes, Diamond City had its faults, but it was a good place to be when you needed some rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today marks the last day before my official Thanksgiving break starts, and that being said, I will likely not update next week due to the fact that I will be using all of my time off to write papers. I hope to get around to posting at some point next week, but I can't say for sure. I hope that you all are able to spend your break resting instead of writing papers, but that's my punishment for procrastinating! ;) Much love to you all!! <3


	16. IRIDESCENT PISS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I do apologize for the brief hiatus between chapters, but I ran into a particularly busy time. Now that I am officially on break, I will be back to a semi-regular posting schedule. I hope you all are doing well, and that December is treating you nicely!! Love you all!! <3

_XVI. IRIDESCENT PISS_

The Glowing Sea was _not_ as cool as it sounded. In fact, she would say that it was actually pretty _lame,_ especially in comparison to the bustling party Nora had just attended the week prior in Diamond City. 

There wasn’t decoration, given the circumstances, but Takahashi lit up the outdoor lights of Power Noodles and gave everyone a free bowl, on the house. Even McDonough was there, stiffly thanking her for her service to the city, and reminding Nat that he was _not_ a _synth, little girl. Stop asking._

Now, she was rapidly reloading .45s into her rifle, ammo courtesy of Arturo Rodriguez as a birthday present, and aiming at Stingwings flying around her head in organized loops. The Glowing Sea had all of her least favorite things from the Commonwealth— Stingwings, Radscorpions, Deathclaws. The feral ghouls weren’t so bad, but they certainly weren’t so good either. 

“Do you think we should have gone with the power armor?” She called, and she had to admit, the bright side of all of this was the robotic undertones of her voice through the hazmat suit. 

“No, power armor is for _pussies,_ boss!” Deacon yelled back as he threw his elbow at one of the flying menaces, finally knocking the thing out of the sky for good. Nora blasted one last shot through the last of them and wiped her helmet of the irradiated gunk that blurred her vision.

“Good to know we’re on the same page about that one. Rad-X?”

“Hit me.”

She dug in her bag for her bottle of anti-radiation pills and handed him a couple, watching him flip up the screen of his suit and down them dry. She popped open a can of purified water for herself. 

“You know, doctors before the war always said that you shouldn’t take pills dry, because they might get stuck in your throat lining and burn holes into your throat,” she admonished. He flipped his helmet shut so she wouldn’t see the look of disgust on his face. 

“Remind me never to do that ever again.”

“Have you ever been here before?” She asked as the two of them stumbled over the crest of a ridge overlooking a crashed plane. The sight was breathtaking and tragic, and Nora felt her heart squeeze violently. What if she had known these people? The skeletons that now burned a dusty yellow under the perpetual glowing fog were still sat in their seats, spines and ribs strapped meaninglessly by splitting safety belts. 

“Not in the thick of it, but I’ve been around the edges,” Deacon’s voice pulled her from her thoughts, and she turned to him, chancing a laugh at the way her own suited form reflected in the screen of his helmet. “Not the wisest idea to laugh at me when you look the exact same, boss.”

Just as she began to form a retort, a rumble overtook the southern sky, sending chills down her arms and stinging the hairs on the back of her neck. Her Geiger counter fluttered wildly as the radiation spiked.

“Radstorm?” She asked simply.

“No, this entire place is one big radstorm. That’s something _worse._ We ought to find cover until it passes. It’s about to hit nighttime anyways. Wouldn’t hurt to hole up for a while.”

The two clambered down the hill towards the wreckage and settled for a cave in the hillside that looked outward to the south. That way, they could keep an eye on the storm as it moved ever closer towards them. 

“How was Diamond City? You get any sleep?” Deacon’s voice was now clearer as he removed his helmet in the shelter of the cave to take a sip of her purified water. “Or did you spend the whole time running errands?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you can’t sit still for two seconds, boss.”

She laughed, knowing that he had her pinned, but he wasn’t entirely correct. The night after her birthday party, she had one of the best sleeps of her life. She hadn’t told Deacon about the birthday party yet, and why should she? He wouldn’t ever bother to let her know when his birthday was at all. 

But she couldn’t stand that kind of bitterness. She couldn’t hold his privacy against him. After all, they had built a strong dynamic on their respective differences, her with her persistent need to flush every little thing out of her system, and his inherent shiftiness. 

“They had a birthday party for me,” she finally announced as a comfortable silence settled over the two of them, sitting criss-cross side by side in the little cove. “As soon as Piper found out that it was my birthday, she told everybody, and we had a party. It was fun. I… I wish you could have been there, but it was last minute, and I didn’t know how to get word to HQ that quickly. I figured the Railroad doesn’t really do birthdays, anyway.”

He opened and closed his mouth like a mounted fish for a few moments, sure that he looked absolutely foolish, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She was removing her helmet and reaching for their shared water can, looking down at the ground the whole time. 

_Jesus, Deacon,_ he thought to himself. _Don’t be an asshole about this. Say something, anything._

He had never even considered that she would still hold onto little things like that— birthdays and anniversaries, Christmas or New Years. That kind of stuff was important before the bombs fell. He hadn’t celebrated his birthday in years, but he felt stupid assuming that she wouldn’t either. He needed to wish her a happy birthday, or apologize for not attending, or not knowing. He needed to ask how old she was, or ask her for her favorite birthday memory. 

“Get anything cool?”

_Still as silver-tongued as ever, Deacon, you bastard,_ he told himself. 

“Got a few things, not much though. I told people not to give me anything, but they insisted. Some ammo, a couple stimpaks, a coupon for a free noodle bowl— and Crazy Myrna even gave me a discount on this stuffed bear she had in stock. It was _blue._ I’ve never seen one like it. Little red bow tie, too. I don’t even know where she got the thing. It’s mine now, though. I’ll show it to you once we get back to HQ.”

He let her continue her rambling, listening attentively to all the little details of her story. He was surprised to find that this gave him a bit of a competitive streak— right now, Crazy Myrna was winning on the _Best Birthday Gift_ front, and he was going to have to find something that would blow that out of the water. He had a few things in mind, but he didn’t dare share them with her. He would enjoy every second waiting to see the look of surprise on her face.

He was so deep in thought about how he could acquire the best birthday gift imaginable that he hardly noticed her standing up and walking outside the cave, knocking her helmet back onto her head with a heavy _smack._

“That’s not proper hazmat management, boss. Where are you off to?”

“Gotta take a leak. You think this fog is gonna make my piss glow?”

“Only one way to find out. Let me know how that turns out for you.”

The sound of her laughter rang throughout the hollow cove, causing him to smile in her absence. When she returned, he was still smiling, and much to his dismay, she noticed. 

“No iridescent piss for now,” she stated as she returned to her seat beside him. He was incredibly aware that the sleeve of her suit was brushing against his, and he was even more aware that he didn’t want to move away from her. He chalked it up to survival instincts. “What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing, boss.”

“C’mon, Deeks. And you can call me by my name, if you want to. I’m not your boss.”

“Oh, no? So that’s why you keep dragging me out into the pits of nuclear hell?”

“You don’t have to be here. You could run along back to HQ, if you’re not having fun,” she prodded, knowing his question was a joke. She could read him, more than he wanted her to. “Deacon, will you _please_ just admit that you enjoy spending time with me? It will make me feel better about myself. As a belated birthday gift, at least.”

“You want me to lie to you? That’s new.”

“ _Deacon.”_

He realized now that this simple request was deadly serious. The look in her eyes told him that this was a simple task, and if he couldn’t complete it, there was a major underlying issue in their partnership. Their _partnership._

That’s what he always called it, but was that really what it was? Was this even just a _friendship?_ He hated the progression of terminology— he didn’t want to label it. Why couldn’t they just hang out until they get killed or fired, and leave it at that? That was what _he_ wanted.

Except it wasn’t. And he knew that. He didn’t want a _partnership._ He wasn’t going to even think of the real kind of relationship he wanted, whether with her or with anybody else, because life had a funny way of fucking up every tiny thing he expressed any interest in. But he knew, deep down, that a _partnership_ wasn’t good enough— not for him, and certainly not for her. 

“I do enjoy spending time with you, Nora. And that’s why it’s time I told you something about myself. If we’re going to be best friends, you need to know why I’m here.”

“Why you’re here, in this cave?” She sputtered for lack of a better response. This was it. This was _bonding._ There were _interpersonal connections_ being made. 

“Why I’m in the Railroad,” he answered, not looking at her. His eyes were foggy and distant behind his sunglasses— which he had still insisted on wearing behind his helmet. She would have laughed, had the lines around his eyes not been horribly saddening. 

_What if he tells me something terrible? What if I can never look at him the same way?_

“When I was younger, I made some pretty bad decisions. And by _pretty bad,_ I mean that I deserve to go straight to hell for the things I did. I used to live over in University Point, and back then, synths were still kind of a new thing. Word was getting around that someone was making robots that looked an awful lot like real human beings and replacing random people. Me and a couple buddies of mine— we thought we were some kind of… vigilante group or something. The UP Deathclaws, we called ourselves. We starting off calling it a _club_ , but I think _domestic terrorism_ is a little more accurate. And it just kept getting worse. Then one day, someone died— was _killed._ He was just lying there, bleeding out on the ground, like a real human. Never did figure out whether he was really a synth or not, but it didn’t even matter. Whatever he was, he was dead.”

He wasn’t finished, but he wasn’t yet ready to carry on, so she scooted herself closer to his side and pressed her arm to his. Even through the rustling, thick material of their hazmat suits, she hoped to convey some sort of humanity, some sort of warmth and affection. 

She came to realize that even this tragedy was not enough to quell her affection for Deacon. She found herself growing sympathetic at the thought of young Deacon, terrified and angry, trying to protect himself and his family. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? He didn’t know better— no one did. 

“That didn’t sit right with me. I’m proud to say that I did my best to get out, just not proud that it took so long for me to do it. I got out of University Point eventually, and turned my back on the whole thing. My old buddies weren’t happy. But I didn’t care, because… because I fell in love,” he continued, and her heart stung at the thought. There was an inevitable tragedy approaching, she thought, and she felt a stomach-churning mixture of sadness and dramatic irony that she worked hard to shove down her throat. “Barbara. Her name was Barbara, and we went to live on a farm together in the Capital Wasteland, raised a Brahmin or two. It was nice. We even wanted to have kids. One day, we found out that Barbara was a synth. I don’t know how the Deathclaws found out, but they did. And it… it wasn’t pretty. And it was my fault. Now, I spend every second of my time trying to help synths, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because I have a debt that I can never fully repay. You may think I’m some kind of knight in shining armor, but you’d be wrong.”

He smiled a very sad kind of smile, one that ripped her heart right down the middle. All his joking, all his mystery— it was a coverup. 

When he had finished spilling his story, she sat with it, let it brew. She felt the sticky steam of it wash over her face and pool in little boiling bubbles on her skin. The night was cool, but she suddenly felt a tinge of that old summer humidity she used to feel on the porch of her old Sanctuary home as the fireflies sputtered through the yard. 

She knew exactly what she wanted to say to him, it was just a matter of timing— she couldn’t let him think that she hadn’t thought about it first. He wanted sincerity, and the only way she could promise him the wholehearted sincerity she felt was to add a little flair of dramatic timing. 

“You were young,” she finally settled, sighing and placing her hands one over the other in her lap. He scoffed, though hardly perceptible. She could tell in the measured labor of his breathing that everything she could ever possibly say had already occurred to him, that he had fought this out a thousand times over in his head, playing advocate for the devil he thought was himself. “And that doesn’t excuse bad actions. You did what you did, and now you’re doing everything in your power to make sure that nobody else does it. I have no qualms about fighting by your side, Deacon. You’re not going to frighten me away by admitting that you make mistakes.”

“Why are you not… uncomfortable?” He asked. She stared at him unabashedly, daring him to look at her. She wanted to see him look at her, even behind his damned sunglasses. She needed him to see her.

“Deacon, I was practically in a cult pre-war. I’ve seen a lot of bad things in my time, and I can’t say that I reacted well to every one of them. Nicky was the first synth I ever saw, and if he didn’t sound like an old Hollywood heartthrob, I probably would’ve shot him right between his freaky yellow eyes. Now he’s practically my dad. You learn things here. The wasteland doesn’t have a moral compass— it can’t,” she shot back, passionate but not angry. “Whatever you did back then, you did it because you were scared. You did it because the world turned into a shitshow, and suddenly everything was trying to kill you, so you killed back. Now you know better. Now you’re doing better. I don’t know who you need to tell you that you’re forgiven, but you are. You just need to forgive yourself. Look your younger self in the eye and remember what it felt like to be born into a world where the second you breathe your first breath, you’re already irradiated.”

He took a sharp inhale of breath, and he still wasn’t looking at her. Maybe he was crying, maybe he was panicking. So she looked away from his eyes for just a moment to see his downturned lips at an angle. He was biting the inside of his bottom lip. He wasn’t crying yet, and he wasn’t going to, if he could help it. But he was close, and it bugged her that she couldn’t know whether her words were effective or not.

“Deacon,” she spoke, barely a whisper, but filled with as much affection as she could muster. She wanted him, for the first time in so long, to feel safe. She wanted him to feel as though he were looking in a mirror to see his own face reflected back, not whatever fresh iteration of Deacon he was wearing this season. “Deacon, I trust you.”

“You can’t—“

“I can’t trust everyone, I know. And I don’t trust everyone. But I trust _you._ Whoever you are, I trust you. You can be whoever, look however you want. Even if I saw you in a bright red sequined dress singing on the stage of the Third Rail with Magnolia’s hair on your head, I’d know it was you, and I’d trust you still.”

He laughed. 

That son of a bitch laughed, his shoulder bobbing up and down and his chest pulsing with the beat of an irregular heart, and his mouth split wide open in a wily grin. And he _wasn’t_ crying, but instead upturning the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes with wry laughter, and that was certainly a comfort.

“You’re something else, Professor.”

“Beth,” she spoke suddenly. Her heart twisted awfully when she said it, but she didn’t regret it. “My fully name is Bethany Eleanor Woodring. Nate called me Nora, but when I was growing up, my friends would call me Beth.”

“Hold up, that’s… your real name? Your actual name?”

“Yeah. That’s the name on my birth certificate.”

“You got a certificate just for being born?”

“Yes, all babies did. It was absurd but functional. The point is, I’m giving you my real name as a symbol of my trust, so do with that what you will. I’m trusting you not to tell anyone. So.”

He was silent, and she had the feeling that he wanted to say something but couldn’t get the words out. That was alright. He had done his part for the day, and now it was her turn to cheer him up. That’s what _best friends_ did after all, right? Normally, it was her saying something tragic about her life pre-war, and he would come up with some corny joke or some strange tale that would make her grin despite herself. Now, their positions were switched, and she was tasked with his happiness. 

“You know Moe Cronin, the guy who runs the baseball-themed store in Diamond City? He thinks that baseball is a game to the death.”

“ _What?”_

“Yeah. He told me that the baseball mitts they would wear were for the purpose of catching bullets.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I absolutely love this season-- the entire month of December is an absolute delight. My family and I celebrate Christmas, so we have been baking and wrapping gifts and decorating. I wish all of you a very happy and peaceful holiday season, no matter what you are celebrating. Much love to you all!! <3


	17. REPAYING THE FAVOR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I can't say that I've been very good at keeping track of the days lately, so hopefully I can maintain a relatively regular posting schedule despite the fact that time doesn't exactly feel real at the moment. ;) I hope December is treating everyone well!! Love you all!! <3

_XVII. REPAYING THE FAVOR_

_The ache in her bones was so pronounced, she was sure she’d had it forever. It was her whole body, too— every muscle, every tendon, every tooth. It all ached._

_She could feel every cell in her body groan as her body hobbled through the doorframe, past the kitchen, and straight for the metal bathtub. Empty, of course, but a comforting thought in her state of exhaustion. The premonition of a hot bath was enough to keep her from outright crying._

_As she stumbled through her ruined house, the wind picked up another sound from down the hallway. A shrill cry, dampened by the hissing of the radstorm outside and the insistent tapping of the skeletal trees on whatever shattered pieces were left of the windows._

_“Nora, sweetheart, Shaun’s crying again,” she swore she heard from the living room. Nate hadn’t been there when she had entered the house, had he? Nate was dead. This was 200 years later, he couldn’t be in the house. But she heard him calling her again, and she watched Codsworth drift past the doorway, all his rusty spots gone and every single one of his eyes blinking in accordance._

_She heard it now. It was piercing, and she could relax with Shaun crying in the background, so she heaved her way forward towards the nursery, the ache in her legs growing more and more pronounced with every inch._

_“Shaun, honey, I’m coming,” she promised. She knew he couldn’t understand her. He wouldn’t stop crying, not even if she asked politely. The little mobile above his head twinkled cheerily, but he ignored it. His eyes were screwed shut, mouth wide open, little fists balled up so tight his chubby knuckles were white._

_“Shh, shh,” she cooed, picking the child up into her arms and shutting the nursery door. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here now. Mommy’s here. You want me to read to you? You want me to sing?”_

_Shaun was inconsolable, and his open mouth was drooling all over her shoulder, all over her black trench coat._

_“Shaun, you shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous for you to be here. I thought… I thought…” she couldn’t say anymore. Her head throbbed as the crying grew louder and louder and louder and Shaun tugged persistently on her hair._

_“Why haven’t you found me, then?” Said a voice. She thought it to be Nate, at first, but the voice wasn’t his. It was no one’s, but it was everywhere in the little room around her. “If you loved me, you would have found me. But you never wanted me. You want me to die.”_

_“No, that’s not true!”_

_It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t. She was so sure of it that it burned in her chest. She hadn’t always liked the idea of having a baby, but she loved Shaun, and she was going to find him. She was going to save him, she had to._

_“You want me to die,” the voice repeated. “That’s why you haven’t found me. You aren’t searching hard enough. You aren’t searching hard enough. You can’t save me. You can’t save me. You can’t save me.”_

She had awoken with a massive headache and a furrowed brow, much to Deacon’s distress. He had taken to sleeping in the mattress by hers, just outside the exit tunnel. Now that they were both having nightmares, it was nice to wake up to see the other sleeping nearby. 

But she had expected the nightmare. She had hardly gotten to sleep the night before in anticipation of the day ahead. It was Courser-killing day. She had the radio on her pip-boy set up to track the signal, and she and Deacon were now trekking down a side-street near Cambridge, listening for the steady blips through the static. 

“Why do you think Coursers are so hard to kill?” She asked as they pulled into an alley to avoid a pack of wandering Mirelurks. 

“Is that a setup for a joke?”

“No, it’s a question. Do you think they’re like… more advanced than other synths?”

“I don’t know, boss. Kind of hard to imagine that any synth could be harder to kill than Glory, though.”

She nodded her assent and pulled a couple of pills from her pocket that would hopefully kill off the last of her headache. It wasn’t as pronounced as it had been earlier that day, but it had settled right behind her eyes, and if she was going to fight to the death with a killing machine, she didn’t need to do it with even a slight headache.

“Hey, do you think we could make a stop on the way?” He asked out of the blue. She raised an eyebrow. “There’s a dead drop from Randolph in a bin nearby. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to pick it up while we’re here.”

“From Randolph? Usually Drummer Boy tells me about those. Sure, I guess.”

“He went ahead and told me, since I’m always where you are.”

She agreed, but kept an eye on the twitch of his eyebrow. Something was afoot. A prank, she assumed. She would stick her hand into the trash bin to retrieve the dead drop, and a Radroach would bite her fingers. That’s what she _assumed_ would happen.

So, when she stuck her hand down the chute, she was pleasantly surprised when there was nothing living inside. Instead, there was the standard holotape tucked against the plastic wall atop a pile of trash. 

_There has to be a less-disgusting way to pass our messages around than hiding them in 200 year old nuclear garbage._

On the white edge of the tape was scrawled a message in black ink.

“ _Couldn’t find ZS,”_ she read aloud. “Is ZS the synth they were transporting? They can’t _find_ him?”

“I don’t know, read the rest.”

“ _Couldn’t find ZS, this should do the trick, though._ What is Randolph playing at? I know we’re a very secretive organization, but I can’t be expected to decode their messages if they speak in riddles like this. What do you think this means?”

“Pop it in your tape player and see.”

The standard green ticked across the screen: _INSERTED: HD75 REMASTER. PLAY?_

As soon as the tape player adjusted to the track, there was a pleasant stream of piano playing through the alleyway. Her mouth hung open as the opening notes of a familiar tune hung in the air around them. She couldn’t speak. Her heart and her mind were all equally speechless, and all her thoughts were garbled and jittery and _happy_. 

Her gaze turned to Deacon, who was beaming at her with his sunglasses propped mischievously on the bridge of his nose. She spluttered as the music played on. The track wasn’t perfect, but it was the first time she had heard it in years. 

“Couldn’t find Ziggy Stardust, but Tom knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who had a couple of old Hunky Dory tunes. It only has about three songs on it, but that’s the best I could do. Happy birthday, boss.”

“Deacon, I could kiss you.”

“You’re gonna have to get in line for that one, boss,” he brushed off her statement, but he was already thinking about it— he was thinking about her _kissing_ him, and it was likely to be a minor distraction for the rest of the day, at least. 

She was thinking about it too, but she was also thinking about how badly she wanted to stop right where they were, lie on the floor of the alley, and listen to the whole album through, but there was a Courser on the loose, and they had work to do. They would listen to it once the Courser was dead. 

“You’re going to have to tell me when your birthday is now,” she called after him as he continued on the path towards C.I.T. “Because you know that I now have to get you a gift that will blow your mind.”

“Good luck with that one.”

“I’ll tell Des you used the dead drop system for personal gain,” she threatened, and he paused mid-stride.

“March 15.”

“You were born on the Ides of March? Ah, shit, that’s already passed this year. I’ll get you when it comes back around, though.”

He reluctantly sighed in agreement as the beeping from her pip-boy picked up rapidly. Greenetech Genetics loomed in the distance, and it was looking more menacing by the second. The closer they came to approaching the building, the more dead Gunners they noted around the entrance. Deacon prodded the limp arm of a dead Gunner, hanging hauntingly still over a standard barrier. Gunners weren’t easy targets. Whatever had been through here, meant business.

_“_ What’s the percentage today?” Deacon questioned as they made their way to the front doors, warily eyeing the Gunner corpse that stood as the welcoming committee by the door.

“72%.”

“Boss, can I ask you something?” He inquired just before her hand touched the door. There was a heaviness to his voice that caused her to turn to him.

“Sure, Deeks. Whatever you want to know.”

“What is… what do you mean when you say that you _know_ how likely you are to die? I mean— I don’t mean to say that I don’t believe you, it’s just kind of strange. I mean, is it like… a radiation side-effect? Could everyone do that before the war?”

She paused. She had thought about it before and chalked it up to something she had dreamt up as a child and held onto into adulthood, but she couldn’t remember exactly when it had started, or how it worked. 

“I don’t know, Deeks. I think it started as a joke, if I’m being honest,” she explained, monitoring his reaction. When she had first told him about it, he had accepted it without a second thought. It was only practical that he should ask her about it, at some point. “It was a kind of game that I would play as a kid. All the radio shows I would listen to as a kid, they were all so full of danger and excitement. Like the Shroud, you know? But my life was so simple and planned that I never felt like I could understand the plot. I never once saw _evil walking the streets of Boston.”_

He stepped forward to lean against the bloodstained door, eyeing her warily. When she had been nearly dead on the bed of the Hawthorne house in Sanctuary Hills, she had talked about her prescience with such conviction that in the moment, he had no choice but to believe her. But it had nagged at his brain, and as much as he _wanted_ to believe that she was some kind of fortune-teller, his mind begged for logical answers.

“When we would play pretend, it was just that. It was _pretend._ I know it sounds kind of dramatic, but I… I guess I made up _fake danger._ I wanted my life to be more like the radio stories, but I knew that it never would be, because everyone that I had ever seen growing up in Sanctuary Hills had stayed in Sanctuary Hills, doing the same things every single day. I couldn’t break out of the cycle, so I turned it into a game. Every day before I went to school, I would pull some random number out of my ass and pretend like that was how likely I was to die that day.”

“That’s an… incredibly morbid game for a kid to be playing,” he remarked slowly, gauging her expression. Nora’s stories were always fascinating and painfully honest, but this one was different. Usually, her stories were about the past, about a life she knew she would never see again. This was very real, very _present._ To his relief, she laughed. 

“Yeah, it was, but it was cathartic. It would give me something to look out for. Most of the time, it was pretty low. 10%, 25%, maybe 30%. That way, I wouldn’t freak myself out, but I would have something to anticipate. I think I needed therapy, probably.”

She laughed a sort of rueful laugh, gazing pointedly at the barrel of her gun, wondering how to proceed. How could she tell him that she had based nearly her entire post-war life off of a game she played as a child? How could she say any of that without sounding like a lunatic? 

_He’s not going to want me watching his back after he finds out that I belong at Parsons._

“I’ve held onto it for so long because I think somewhere along the way, I started really believing in it. When I was fourteen, I woke up, and the first number I thought of was 68%. That didn’t really scare me, because I knew I was making it up, but that afternoon I broke my leg falling down the stairs. After that, it kind of freaked me out. Even after I got married and had a house of my own, I started thinking that maybe I could tell if Nate was going to die, too.”

“And… could you?” He asked lamely. He wasn’t sure what he had expected when he had initiated the conversation, but it certainly wasn’t reaffirmed belief. If she had claimed that she had a supernatural ability, he would have been able to laugh it off and move on with his life. Instead, it was just _Nora._ It was that, as usual, she was quick and perceptive and witty. 

“That part might have been psychosomatic, but I _swear_ there was something off about him the day the bombs fell. Look, Deacon, I know it sounds batshit, but when I wake up every morning and I can pretend like I know _for sure_ that I’m not going to die— that’s what makes me get out of bed in the morning. Before the war, it gave me some kind of stupid game to play with myself, but now, it forces me to get off my ass and try to do something nice for someone.”

“So that’s why you insist on running into the middle of a firefight with only a baseball bat and a plastic knife?”

“Don’t make fun of me, Deacon,” she quipped. Her voice was laced with humor, but there was a distinct vein of candor. 

“I’m not making fun of you, boss,” he swore, his voice lowering to a near whisper. He placed his hand firmly on her shoulder, forcing her to look at him. “If that’s what keeps you going, who am I to tell you you’re crazy?”

“But you _do_ think I’m crazy?”

“No. I think you’re probably the sanest person around.”

She smiled weakly, and he mentally noted that he would have to work on that reassurance in the future. His words hadn’t fully settled in her mind, but if he could prove to her that he believed her, he could wipe that small frown of her face that made his heart pang pitifully.

After all, what was the difference between her reasons and his? If she wanted to risk her life for the people of the Commonwealth because she had convinced herself that she wouldn’t be horrifically killed for it, good on her. Was that truly any different than Deacon joining an incredibly dangerous underground organization because he thought it would wipe invisible debt from an invisible ledger? 

The plain fact was that both of them had a bone to pick with themselves and the world. However she chose to express it, and however she chose to confront it, he would be behind her every step of the way. He would probably follow her to the ends of the earth if she led him there, promising that she only had a 50% chance of dying there.

_If I woke up in the morning and knew that I wasn’t going to die,_ he thought to himself as they finally pushed their way through the heavy front doors, _there’s a lot of shit that I would do. If I knew, for sure, that I wasn’t going to die— hell, I’d go out and start a fight with a Deathclaw just for fun._

The halls of Greenetech Genetics were a veritable warzone, as the pounding of fragmentation grenades and the heavy fire of automatic pistols raged on the floor above. Luckily for them, the Gunners that were fortunate enough to have kept their lives thus far were largely too concerned with the Courser moving through the building than they were two agents sneaking up stairways. 

“The Idea of March…” Deacon wondered aloud as the two tucked into a tight staircase, strategically avoiding the fragmentation grenade that hung like apocalyptic Christmas ornaments from the ceiling above. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“Assassination of Julius Caesar.”

“That’s something you keep in mind at all times?”

“The only book I’ve read in over 200 years is _The History of Rome: Volume 3.”_

“Remind me to lend you my copy of Proust sometime.”

She chuckled quietly to herself as they reached the top floor of the building, realizing with a sinking feeling in her gut that there were no more tell-tale signs of fighting coming from the rooms ahead, but the steady voice of the Courser rang through the halls. He had subdued the Gunners. It was now up to Deacon and Nora to get rid of him. 

“You. Come here,” the Courser called, and Nora stiffened. She motioned to Deacon to remain where he was, and though he remembered what had happened the last time he had ignored that specific request, he shook his head firmly.

“No can do, boss,” he intoned, lifting his rifle to his chest firmly. 

“Deacon—“

“Absolutely not. That’s a _Courser._ In fact, I’m going in first.”

He traipsed past her casually, clapping her shoulder impersonally and leaving her a little disappointed that she wasn’t able to convince him, but also oddly proud. When he had stayed behind at Fort Hagen, it was because there was still a distinct working separation between the two. They were partners, but they didn’t have to be. Now, they were partners, through and through. If she was walking into certain danger, so was he. And though that meant that she couldn’t always protect everyone from everything, she felt a sense of peace at that thought.

She didn’t _have_ to protect everyone and everything. 

The Courser was unnervingly polite to the both of them, holstering his weapon as he greeted them in measured tone. But the cordial conversation soon turned hostile— the Courser was looking for a rogue synth, one the Gunners were keeping hostage at the top of the building. This was more than Nora hunting him down, this was about the Railroad directly interfering with his job. He was going to kill her or die trying. 

Nora had wondered the whole trip what the difference was between a regular synth and a Courser. She had talked with Glory, seen the warmth in her eyes. Glory’s hands were warm and soft and caring when she wasn’t on a mission. She had a characteristic twitch of her nose that happened when she laughed, and her voice was so uniquely _Glory_ that Nora could recognize it a mile away. 

The Courser was dead behind the eyes. His intensely blue irises blinked in perfect sync, staring her down as she approached. He was cold and stiff and robotic. She had the feeling that if she tried talking to him for any longer, she would still be unable to discern any kind of personality from him. 

This time, she did not get the first shot. The Courser blasted a blue streak of light towards her face, skimming the edge of her neck. 

_At least that scar will make me look cool and edgy._

Deacon rounded the corner, attempting to effectively trap the blurred shadow of the Courser, shifting against the flat plane of the wall. With a grunt, Deacon threw the butt of his rifle forward, landing a precise shot that forced the Courser towards Nora, who was ready with her own weapon. 

In their travels, they had fallen into a comfortable pattern when it came to fighting, so much so that Nora had forgotten exactly how skilled Deacon was with a gun, or even with his bare hands. When they were taking on a team of Super Mutants or a swarm of Bloatflies, she had gotten used to how casually they were able to maintain conversation, or warn each other about oncoming danger. Now, when the threat was immensely more imminent, and they were faced with a fight that took every mental and physical faculty they had, he fought with incredible coordination and skill.

The Courser was just beginning to appear again, his thick black coat flashing in streaks of charcoal as he maneuvered around the room’s center, but as soon as his figure came into sight, he was gone again, and his shadow blended with the rubble that lined the walls. 

Nora cursed under her breath, trying to keep her eyes on the Courser but using her peripheral to monitor Deacon’s movements. Deacon was stock still with his rifle poised and his trigger finger hovering loosely, ready to take a shot as soon as the Courser reappeared. 

But he didn’t. The room was painfully silent— even the captive Gunners sat by the wall seemed to hold their breath to listen for footsteps, but they heard nothing but silence. 

Before she could retaliate, Nora’s entire body was swept out from under her, and she fell onto the cold tile floor. With the care of Dr. Carrington and Sturges combined, she had made a remarkable recovery from her injuries at Fort Hagen, but she groaned as her ribs made contact with the hard tile. She pulled herself up onto her palms and tried to back up towards the wall where she could more easily find her way to her feet, but she could feel the Courser following her every move, tracking her as she tried to escape. His foot pressed into her abdomen, pinning her to the floor. 

She was down. It was up to Deacon to get her out, and she nearly made her eyes water as she tried to keep her gaze strictly on the shadow of the Courser in front of her. If Deacon could go unnoticed, he could get her out of this, and that couldn't happen if her eyes were tracking his movements. 

With his foot still on her abdomen, the Courser turned to meet Deacon’s hand as he tossed a steady right hook. It was odd, watching Deacon fight with nothing but the air, but as much as she normally might have laughed at it, she couldn’t produce even a smile. The pressure on her abdomen ached, and her best friend was fighting to the death with a killing machine, right in front of her eyes. 

In one swift movement, Deacon grasped the Courser’s arm, planted a kick to his half-visible chest, and put a quick bullet between his eyes. 

“You good, boss?” Deacon asked, out of breath as he extended a hand to Nora. She went to take it, but Deacon suddenly fell to the ground beside her. 

“Oh my god—“ she started, before realizing that he was laughing. He hadn’t fallen from exhaustion or injury. He had _tripped._ “Oh my god, Deacon. I was about to congratulate you on one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life, but you ruined it.”

“I couldn’t help it! He’s still partially invisible, what was I supposed to do? Besides, I’m wounded.”

She looked over to where he sat beside her, suddenly noticing that his jeans were stained with darkened blood. When he had tripped, he had split his knee on the handle of a tool chest. It was a bit grisly, but it wasn’t life threatening, though the expression on his face told her that he was going to make it seem that way. 

“C’mon, let’s get you to Dr. Carrington.”

“I can’t move,” he swore, his voice raising dramatically as he pressed his hand to his forehead, looking like a character in _Gone With the Wind._ “I’m mortally wounded.”

“You’ve got a boo-boo.”

“A _fatal_ boo-boo.”

“You know what, Deeks? At least I had the courtesy to pass out when I got shot,” she quipped as she helped him to his feet. 

“At least _I_ had the courtesy not to nearly die.”

Nora might have said that it made them even— her taking a desperate leap to block Kellogg’s shot, and him body-slamming a Courser before it could kill her, but there was no need. There was no sense of payment between them, no promise of equal exchange or repaying of favors. It was simply something they did for each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season!! Today is a very exciting day for me-- I've been invited to play Dungeons and Dragons over Zoom with some good friends of mine. It'll be my first time playing, so my friend is teaching me how to play today. Sit back, relax, and take some time for yourself today!! Much love to you all!! <3


	18. CALM BEFORE THE STORM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! Once again, sorry I didn't get around to putting up a new chapter for a bit. Here's a new chapter, and I hope that you all enjoy it!! Love you all!! <3

_XVIII. CALM BEFORE THE STORM_

Upon returning to the Railroad, Deacon had gotten an earful from Nora, Desdemona, Glory, Carrington, Tom, Drummer Boy, and even a slight admonishment from PAM. Whether this was because they feared for his safety or because he was being overdramatic about the entire affair was a different matter.

“Oh, so when the Professor does it, she gets a plaque and a park named after her. When Deacon does it, it’s all, ‘ _Deacon, you’re an idiot. Deacon, you’re an asshole. Deacon, why did you have to inconvenience us by getting injured?’_ If I didn’t know any better, I would think that you guys aren’t appreciative of my heroic gesture.”

“I’m appreciative, Deacon, just not happy about it,” Nora had replied calmly as she flipped through Deacon’s Grognak collection. Carrington had patched him up well, threatening at every turn to sedate him so he would shut up, but eventually settling on having Nora sit close by so that Deacon would have someone to babble to.

“It’s also not a _heroic gesture_ if you didn’t actually get hit by the Courser,” Glory reminded him. “Taking down the Courser was a good move, but tripping over the Courser and hitting your knee on a tool chest isn’t exactly a power move.”

“I thought we were going to go with the ‘ _picked a fight with a Yao Guai’_ story,” Deacon murmured towards Nora, who simply smirked as she flipped the page. 

“I told you, Deeks. I have no reason to lie about my credentials, and now that you’re my partner, I won’t lie about _your_ credentials either.”

Deacon had gone over a hundred different tall tales on their way back to HQ, and she had played along, warning him all the while that she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to tell Tom and Glory exactly what had happened.

“ _But it would also be cool if we told them that I ripped off a Deathclaw’s horns with my bare hands and got my knee slashed open by a claw?”_

_“Then you’d have to bring the actual horns for proof.”_

_“True. But not if I used the horn to slay the Deathclaw.”_

_“You should write novels, Deacon.”_

He had gone with a tale about a glowing Mirelurk as Carrington had started stitching him up, but Carrington wouldn’t have it. He had recruited Nora to distract Deacon during his medical procedure.

“If you talk to him, Professor,” Carrington said in a measured tone, though it was clear he was on the verge of shouting, “then maybe he will stop complaining for two seconds, and I can actually get something done.”

Now, Deacon was resting in a lawn chair in the middle of Nora’s old front yard in Sanctuary. He had his leg propped up on an ottoman, and she had to do everything in her power to keep him from standing up to help. If he broke his stitches, Carrington would have _her_ head.

Tinker Tom and Sturges were in the middle of piecing together wires and circuit boards, using the best of one another’s brain power to construct what would soon be a massive teleportation machine. Nora had chosen to build it on an empty plot where a ruined house had once stood, and though her priorities were firmly placed in the Railroad, she couldn’t help but allow the Minutemen in on her mission, to Desdemona’s slight chagrin. 

She was happy she had done it, though, as she watched Tom and Sturges chat casually about circuits and vacuum tubes and all sorts of technical things she didn’t understand. The two were becoming fast friends. 

It would be built by the next day, and then, she would either be off to the Institute, or she would be a little pile of ash sitting neatly on top of the machine’s main platform. Either way, the prospect was frightening. 

_If I wake up with 100%, will I still try it? Will I chicken out? Will I even have the option of saving myself?_

Her percentage had never been above 90, and the thought scared her more than she cared to admit. As accustomed as she was to her prescience, and as much as she understood it to be a product of what might be considered her _overactive imagination_ , she couldn’t honestly say that she knew how it worked or how she might cheat it or if she _could_ cheat it. It just happened, and she trusted it to the letter. 

“Deacon, sit back down,” Tom called, and Nora whipped her head around to glare in his direction. He was trying desperately to push himself up out of the metal blue chair to come see what was going on, but her glance forced him back into his seat. 

“C’mon, boss, I just want to see what they’re building over there. I can handle it. Just for five minutes?” Deacon pleaded with her as she strolled over to where he sat, pitifully pouting his lip as if he were a child, begging to stay up late. 

“No, Deacon.”

“But—“

“You didn’t let me so much as _blink_ after I got shot by Kellogg, so I’m _definitely_ not letting you stand up with fresh stitches.”

As the massive silhouette of the teleportation machine rose against the horizon, the sun fell below the trees. The settlers had already turned in for the night by the time Deacon and Nora began meandering towards the Hawthorne house, him resting heavily on her shoulder. 

They had agreed that it would be unwise for him to sleep in a house of his own, just in case he woke up in the night bleeding from somewhere he shouldn’t be. He would be taking the bed, and she would take the couch. When he had protested this arrangement, she had won the argument with her specialty— a sob story. 

“ _Deacon, I have trouble sleeping in a bed in Sanctuary Hills without… you know, nightmares,”_ she had said dramatically, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear to emphasize her innocence and play up the tragedy of her past.

_“Nora, you’re full of shit,”_ he had responded without a second thought, but he was already picking up the spare pillow she had handed him in defeat.

_"Yeah, but I won, didn’t I?”_

As the clock hit 11 PM, Deacon had limped into the bedroom, and Nora lingered by the front windows, looking off at the plot of land where her destiny sat. Mama Murphy had wandered up to her as she had been tightening a screw and said something incredibly prophetic— she couldn’t remember what it was, though. Mama Murphy talked _very_ slowly, and Nora’s brain worked at an incredibly fast pace, and the two were incompatible as far as conversations were concerned. But from what Nora could remember, Mama Murphy predicted something great on the horizon, something exciting. 

_I could have told you that myself, Mama._

The lights were on in her own house across the street where Codsworth was hovering about, taking care of this and that, and Preston shining the barrel of his laser rifle. She had been right, when she had told the Minutemen that Sanctuary would be good for them. They were filling it with new life, and the promise of protection. Garvey was a good man, of that she could be sure. 

Her fingers traced the tattered lace on Natalie’s old windowsill. What had her husband’s name been? Harvey? Harold. Harold Hawthorne was her husband’s name, but to Nora, this was not Harold’s house. She had only ever seen Natalie caring for it, and that made it Natalie’s house. Natalie scrubbed every square inch of it until it shone. She cooked and cleaned and nearly broke her back clearing cobwebs from the smallest corners of the baby-blue walls. Natalie Hawthorne was an unsung hero of Sanctuary Hills, single-handedly upholding the idea that a woman could properly care for her home while her husband was away. 

While Nora hated to uphold such a vile stereotype, she loved Natalie more than anything. Natalie understood her, far better than Nate ever would. Nora looked down at the couch, the ugly orange floral pattern that she hated but couldn’t help but love, in some way. The sight of it made her feel welcome, but she knew she would never be able to successfully fall asleep on it. 

_I’m about to become part of a cliche, aren’t I?_

Deacon laid flat on his back on the bed, head facing straight up towards the ceiling. He couldn’t sleep on his side just yet, due to his relatively fresh injury, but hopefully by the time she returned from the Institute, he would be more comfortable. She knew he already had enough trouble sleeping as it was. He didn’t need an open gash messing up his sleep schedule.

“You mind if I join you for a little while?” She asked, taking a hesitant seat on the mattress beside him. He stirred. 

“How did you know I was awake?”

“Deacon, you’re still wearing your sunglasses. I know you don’t sleep in those.”

“Fair enough. Come on in, the water’s fine.”

She laid with her head back on the pillow, mirroring his position with her hands folded neatly across her abdomen. They rested in the quiet for a moment, simply enjoying each other’s presence, until Deacon had to ruin it by caring about her mental wellbeing.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, nothing. Just the weather,” she quipped in return, and he groaned. “What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, what’s on my mind? I’m just thinking about how you’re going to _evaporate_ tomorrow. No big deal.”

“I’m not _evaporating,_ I’m _teleporting._ ”

She wanted desperately to hide her worry from Deacon. If this had been a normal mission, she would have told him exactly how frightened she was, but this wasn’t a normal mission at all. She was going alone, and Deacon was staying here. She was walking right into what was possibly a death trap, if she even survived the teleportation process. What she would find on the other end was quite possibly more terrifying than death. Deacon didn’t need to worry about that, he needed to worry about himself, about his recovery. He needed to worry about learning to forgive himself.

But of course, he was annoyingly perceptive. That, and her voice had cracked as she spoke. 

“Hey, hey,” he muttered as she tried to fight back the frightened tears that forced their way into her eyes. He turned to his side to properly face her, though it twisted his face into a pained grimace. “It’s okay, Nora. Talk to me.”

She bit her lip to keep her mouth shut for a moment, but out of the corner of her eye, she watched him reach a hand to his face and remove his glasses. 

_Shit. The glasses are off. Code Red._

_His eyes are blue, I was fucking right._

“I’m really fucking scared, Deeks. Not just about the teleportation shit, but… what if I don’t find him? I keep having these nightmares, and I don’t know what to do if he’s not there.”

“Remember what you told me? Every dream is a good dream, if you’re doing it right. Those are just dreams. And even if he’s not there, it’s not your fault. You have done everything in your power to get Shaun back. And whether or not you come back with your son, I will _always_ be here for you.”

Her quiet sobbing broke his heart, and against his better judgement, he reached his arms out to her and pulled her into his chest, holding her with all the fear in mind that she might never return to him. This might be the last night he had with her, and though he wasn’t sure he could properly tell her how much she meant to him, he had to let her know _something._ She deserved that, at least. 

“Do you want to talk about something else? To take your mind off of it?” He asked, and he could feel her head nod against his chest. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, but all at the same time, he felt like his lungs were clearer than ever. 

It was _him_ that was the problem, he thought. But there was nothing he could do about it. They couldn’t have any kind of relationship past their friendship, not in their line of work. He wasn’t ready for that, and he wasn’t sure he ever would be. But at the same time, holding her close felt so obviously _right_ that he couldn’t bear to push her away.

“Give me more of your pre-war wisdom,” he requested as she pulled out of his arms and back to her half of the bed.

“No one will judge your cooking skills if you just say, ‘I whipped up a quick rice dish.’ That’s what I brought to every neighborhood cookout. A rice dish,” she said quietly, leaning her head into her hand. “It was instant rice with some cabinet spices on it. Everyone complimented my husband on picking such a good cook for a wife.”

“I wish that were applicable in our line of work.”

“I’m sorry, but has the Railroad tried presenting the Institute with a casserole? I think not. Don’t knock it until you try it. But we had to stop eating rice for a while up until the bombs dropped. It was too _Chinese_. It was injecting the children with communism.”

“Maybe when you get back, you can teach me how to bake a pie, and I can bring it to Elder Maxson to see if it cures his chronic racism.”

“You know, Deacon, if I didn’t know any better, I would think that you’re insulting me.”

“I’m not, and I want you to tell me more things.”

She giggled and he suddenly understood the old-world concept of a _sleepover—_ talking all night, laughing about little things. This was comfortable. Spending the night in Sanctuary gave them the unique privilege of being physically close without the thought that anyone in the Railroad could be watching at any time. Now, the quiet darkness hid their clandestine conversations as they both felt the approach of sleep. 

_It might be easier to fall asleep with her here, listening to the sound of her voice,_ he thought. _A strategic advantage._

“Sometimes, I would play cards with Codsworth in the afternoons,” she murmured. The sleepiness in her voice was overwhelmingly endearing. She yawned, balling her hands to rub at her eyes, and Deacon thought his heart might stop. He was uncomfortably comfortable with the whole situation, and his base instinct wanted him to relax into it, but his experience told him to keep his distance, to simply listen attentively and suppress any other feelings. “He was really good at it, probably because he’s a robot. But I was always better at Rummy. Maybe he let me win, I don’t know. But every single time we played Rummy, I won.”

“Can Codsworth even hold a playing card? How does that work?”

“He has… hands, sort of. He has a grabby-tool. It wasn’t too easy for him to grasp the cards, but he got better at it the more we played.”

“I wonder if we could find a deck of playing cards somewhere,” he mused, and she began giggling. “What? What’s so funny?”

“I was just remembering—“ she began, but her voice was cut up by laughter. “You know how Mr. Handy robots sometimes have flamers attached to them? One time, when we were playing cards, he got frustrated because he couldn’t hold an ace properly, and he accidentally caught it on fire. I had to draw a new ace on a piece of paper so we could finish the game.”

She whispered to him about other things— about her life before the war, about the travels she had in the wasteland before she met him. When he read novels, he always paid close attention to the recognizable traits of each character. He studied the things that made them the way they were, and the ways their counterparts viewed them. He was fascinated with the development of personality in these old novels, the ways the characters so often engaged in long-winded stories about their pasts. After all, he felt that he could trace his own life like that. He had an exposition and a hell of a lot of conflict, and he didn’t have to dig deep into his past to tell exactly what had happened that made him the way he was.

At first, he had tried to read Nora like this. He took in all the stories of her past with rapt attention, expressing an interest in both her and the old world, but the Nora that had lived in the little blue house in Sanctuary Hills seemed an entirely different person. She seemed to have the same wit, the same ambition, but never had she been so passionate.

He realized rather quickly that he couldn’t read her like a book. She was a real person, and more than that, she was a woman who had _chosen_ her behaviors. She had been deliberate with her rebirth. If she had wanted to, she could have allowed herself to conform to her past and remain quietly discontent but outwardly docile. Instead, she had determined herself to be capable of being great— capable of being passionate and brave and exhaustingly generous. 

_And if she doesn’t have to be defined by that past… if she can choose to be better, maybe so can I. Maybe I already have._

She was not the only one telling stories under the fractured moonlight. He spoke, too. He appreciated her stories, so he gave her some of his own in exchange. She felt herself begin to drift off, but she didn’t want to stay unless she had his express permission. 

She wished he would make some sort of gesture, say one little word that would let her know that she could stay. She wanted to lie down next to him— not even in his arms, just by his side, at least. She wasn’t sure if that was because she wanted to be with him specifically or because she just didn’t want to be alone.

And he looked like he might be about to say it, to extend her the offer of half the bed, but his mouth pursed tight as he watched her sit upright. 

He couldn’t. He shouldn’t. Even if he wanted to— and he wasn’t going to let himself decide whether or not he wanted to— he wouldn’t. He had already told her more about himself than he ever intended to, and he couldn’t in good conscience allow any further _bonding_ nonsense.

He brushed off the thought quickly— he had a _reputation_ to upkeep, after all. He was cool, he was stealthy, he was unattached. If she wanted to form interpersonal connections, that was on her conscience, but he couldn’t continue to take part in it. 

So, he turned over on his side with a curt, “Night, boss,” and closed his eyes before she could convince him of anything emotionally precarious. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the holiday season treated everyone well! I did a lot of baking, and a lot of sleeping in. Having a virtual Christmas was a little strange, but seeing family over a screen was better than not seeing them at all, and safer that being in person. I hope you are all having a lovely start to your week, and that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy!! Much love to you all!! <3


	19. INSTITUTIONALIZED

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I wish you all a lovely New Year, and here's hoping that 2021 treats everyone better than 2020 did. Thank you all for the lovely comments you have left-- I hope you enjoy this new chapter. Love you all!! <3

_XIX. INSTITUTIONALIZED_

The reflector platform was starting to heat up. She could feel it vibrate under her feet, warming the rubber soles of her shoes. Above the rattle of the generators and the fuzzy static of the platform’s coils, she could hear Tinker Tom and Sturges shouting, calling out the next step for the other to hear. Desdemona had given her a network scanner with strict orders to make discreet contact with a Railroad agent on the inside. 

And in general, she was feeling good. She had come to terms with the fact that the reflector might disintegrate her in the blink of an eye, and her friends in the Railroad and Minutemen had somewhat come to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t know whether or not she died until she came back— or _didn’t._ It was all very dramatic, but it was hard to convince Deacon to be particularly _excited_ about it.

She had already been awake when Deacon had meandered into the kitchen, his gait still stunted by a stiff limp. She had cracked open a can of cram and made a couple sandwiches for breakfast, and they ate mostly in silence. She had wanted to say something, though she wasn’t sure what. She wanted to establish something, anything. The two of them were friends. They had watched each others backs for months, seen each other at some of their lowest moments, and yet, the essence of _Deacon_ and their relationship was still frustratingly elusive to her.

When Nate had died, she had cried more of loneliness than of specific grief. She hadn’t _wanted_ it to happen, and she certainly would have stopped it, given the chance, but the thought of it disturbed her on a deeper level than that. She had moved on from Nate’s death with surprising ease, and that had horrified her. She thought she was like a machine, that she was some kind of emotionally detached weirdo, and she couldn’t tell anyone about it. It took her some time to realize that it was _Nate_ that should be horrified. What was his legacy? Who remembered him? If he was watching from heaven or hell or hades, he would find that his wife was doing perfectly fine for herself.

It might have been selfish, but she didn’t care— if she died in the Institute, she wanted someone to _care_ about that. She wanted someone to mourn. She wanted to know how much Deacon would miss her if she died, and as awful as that desire made her feel, she _had_ to know that she wasn’t dying quietly, that someone would cry for her.

But that was a whole underlying danger to the matter. If either of them made some grand confession in the early hours of the morning, and then she disappeared into nothingness forever, well then, that was just embarrassing, wasn’t it?

As soon as they had eaten, though, he was quick to ask her what was on his mind. 

_“What’s the percentage, Nora?”_

_“What, no ‘good morning’? No ‘how did you sleep’?”_

_“Beth.”_

_“92%.”_

Deep down, he knew that this was a number based on her own calculations, based on her own fear, but she held that number to be a true universal constant. She had said it with such conviction in her eyes that he was almost positive she had received the number from Atom himself, whispering it in her ear as soon as she woke up.

He stepped up to the side of the platform, against her strict instructions to remain seated, crossing his arms and peering above the edge of his glasses. 

_Eye contact— his new cheap gag to try to get me to do what he wants,_ she thought as she fought back a smile. 

“You can step off of that platform any time you want to, you know,” he called jokingly, but Desdemona sent him a stern glare. “I mean… _godspeed,_ boss.”

“You don’t want me to find my son, save the synths, and blow up the Institute? Just for your personal comfort? Wow, didn’t know you were that selfish,” she prodded. It was a pitiful attempt to diffuse the tension, but it worked, at least a little, and it certainly resolved some of her apprehension that she might not be missed at all.

“Just wish there were some kind of way you could let us know you made it, is all. Does your pip-boy have inter-dimensional phone call capabilities?”

“Yeah, but all calls are collect, and this thing doesn’t take caps as a form of currency,” she returned, though she wished she could do _something_. Half the Railroad would probably be tense for the next few days at least, wondering if they had accidentally blown up the Professor. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done with what I need to do.”

“And that is?” Desdemona prompted. The two of them had run over the mission details several times, but in the last few seconds before teleportation, it was pertinent for Des to make sure her agent knew what she was doing. 

“Plug in the network scanner, meet with Patriot, set up a means of synth escape. That’s my Railroad track. Otherwise, I’m finding an experimental FEV serum, potentially finding my kidnapped son, and trying my damndest not to die.”

“Good work, Professor. We’re all counting on you.”

“You got it, Des.”

Sturges tightened one last bolt on the receiver before wiping his hands on his coveralls and giving Tom a sturdy thumbs-up. It was time. 

“You ready, Professor?” Tom yelled above the growing static rumbling. It felt like the whole of Sanctuary Hills was about to be swallowed into hell the way the ground shook the foundations of all the little houses along the way. Nora nodded. “Alright, then, I’m powering her up in three… two… _one.”_

Nora winked vaguely into the small crowd around her before shutting her eyes. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but it felt right. She savored the last image she had of her friends in her mind, and if the transporter blew up, she wouldn’t see the horror on their faces as she erupted into a swirling pyre of flame. 

But she didn’t. The image remained in her brain, and it was almost as if the picture were moving, but only slightly. She could see the wavering of Sturges’s nervous stance, the steady rise and fall of Desdemona’s chest as she took a drag from a fresh cigarette. It was like she was watching them disappear from her vision in real time as she felt what could only be described as a wholly new and abhorrently vile sensation in her entire body. 

A streak of blinding white passed her eyes, piercing even through her closed lids, as her body was hit by a force of light that felt like an eighteen-wheeler slamming directly into her chest. She could feel the vibrations in her bones, the ache in her teeth. Her whole body rattled with the power of it. 

This was death, surely. She wasn’t going to survive this one. She couldn’t grab hold of the mechanism in her brain that told her how close she was to death, and she couldn’t tell it to bring her back, to put her back on the ground in Sanctuary. 

_I promise, I swear, I’ll leave the Institute alone if you just put me back._

The universe wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily, but fortunately, it also wasn’t going to kill her. She took a breath and nearly choked on the purity of the air. It was strange how accustomed she had become to the radiation of the wasteland, how natural it had begun to feel in her lungs. Now that she was breathing something undoubtedly healthy, it felt wrong. 

_She was in the Institute._

She couldn’t help but hold her breath as she stepped into the atrium. She wasn’t sure what exactly she had expected of the Institute, but the room in which she found herself was too… _plain._ There was a single computer facing the transporter chamber and a few crates pushed up against the walls. 

Where were the mad scientists? Where were the synths and the futuristic experiments, and where was the _danger?_ Why had no one attacked her immediately upon entry?

“Hello.”

_Oh. There it is. Milder welcome than I expected, but alright._

“Hi, there,” she spoke aloud. She was unsure if the disembodied voice could hear her, but she figured it was never a bad idea to make a good first impression.

“I wondered if you might make it here. You’re quite resourceful.”

“Thanks, man. Who is this? I would introduce myself, but it seems like you already know me, so…”

“I am known as Father; the Institute is under my guidance.”

“Cool. Very nice to meet you, Father.”

_Can I call you ‘Dad’?_ She wanted to ask, but she knew that if she said it, she wouldn’t hear Deacon’s laugh behind her. She would hear silence, or gunshots. 

“I know why you’re here. I’d like to discuss things with you, face-to-face,” the voice assured in a soothing tone. By all means, this could have been a trap, but as she approached an elegantly spiraled elevator door, curiosity began to take a hold of her.And besides, there was nowhere to run. The only place behind her was the mouth of the transporter room, the only place ahead certain danger. “Please, step into the elevator.”

The door swept itself open, without her even having to touch a thing. As it rose higher and higher, the scenery around her took on a whole different tone. Everything down below had been simple, and very technical. The upper levels were near exactly how she had pictured it— flourishing plants that she hadn’t seen since before the bombs dropped, scientists in pristine coats walking from place to place, clean and bright lighting that illuminated the obviously advanced technology that the Institute had to offer.

_Was this really such a bad place? Was this the same Institute that had kidnapped her child?_

“I can only imagine what you’ve heard, what you think of us,” Father continued. His voice followed her everywhere she stepped, as if it were living in her own head. “I’d like to show you that you may have… the wrong impression.”

She turned to see the main walkways and all the little spiral hallways around her. She probably looked like a child in a candy store, unsure of what to look at first, or what was her favorite part. She wanted to spend _weeks_ there, tracing every line and finding every nook. It was everything Sanctuary Hills had tried to be— perfect, light, orderly— except it seemed from where she stood to lack the human dissonance that had ruined it all. This place was sempiternal. 

“Welcome to the Institute.”

She had no more response. Her eyes filled with tears as the elevator continued, up, up, up.

“This is the reality of the Institute. This place, these people, the work we do. For over a hundred years, we’ve dedicated ourselves to humanity’s survival. Decades of research, countless experiments and trials… a shared vision of how science can help shape the future.”

_If this is where Shaun is… maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe he deserves to live here, instead of out there. Has he ever seen the Commonwealth? If he is alive here, is he too clean to be in my presence? Will my exposure infect him?_

She suddenly felt very unclean, very improper. If she were to meet her son here, his first impression of his mother would be that she was a dirty wastelander, bruised and battered and armed to the teeth. She had come prepared for a fight, but with no combatants in sight, she felt silly.

“It has never been easy, and our actions are often misinterpreted by those above ground. Someday, perhaps, we can show them what we’ve accomplished. But for now, we must remain underground,” Father explained simply as the elevator door opened in front of her. Another hallway, another elevator, this one without the view. 

“There’s too much at stake here to risk it all. As you’ve seen, things above are… unstable. I’d like to talk to you about what we can do… for everyone,” Father’s voice spoke as the second elevator’s door opened for her into a new room, a perfectly clean and white room with a glass display window gleaming against the left wall. “But that can wait. You are here for a specific, very personal reason.”

She stepped through into the room, viewing into the clear glass for the first time. A young boy sat facing away from her. He was meddling with something on the floor, some toy she couldn’t see. She could not see his face, but she knew without a doubt who it was— after all, she had seen him in Kellogg’s memory.

“You are here for your son,” the voice resonated and settled in her chest, but she hadn’t really been listening anymore.

“Shaun?”

“Who are you?” The boy asked, standing to his full height to look at her. There was no recognition in his eyes, but of course there wouldn’t be— he was a baby when he was taken. He wouldn’t remember her, and he certainly wouldn’t remember his father. 

“I’m… I don’t know,” she muttered, and the boy looked at her in confusion. She wasn’t sure she should tell him. Would he want her to be his mother? Would he be afraid of her? Was she ready to be a mother again? “Shaun, I’m… I’m your mother, but—“

“My mother? I don’t understand. Father? Who is this woman? Father, help!”

“Oh, um, okay, I—“ she sputtered, realizing as the boy became frightened of her how much it hurt. She knew in her heart that he wouldn’t know her, but she still wanted him to know that she _loved_ him, that she had fought her way through the entire Commonwealth to find him.

“Shaun,” called the voice of Father, this time live and in person, as an older man stepped through the doorway into the room with them. He gave the boy a recall code, and Shaun simply shut down. “I’m sorry about that. He didn’t quite respond the way I had expected. Still a few bugs to work out.”

“So that’s not my son?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he told her solemnly, but the news was nearly a relief.

She sized up the man in front of her. He had kind eyes, but his face was weathered and stern. This was the man in charge. Undoubtedly, her son was here, and this was the man who knew where her son was. But his brow drooped low over his eyes, as if he were burdened with some heavy secret that she did not yet know, as if she were dying of an unknown disease and he was the doctor assigned to tell her. 

“Father. I know you’ve been watching me. You said that you expected I would end up here. You didn’t let me in because you think I’m here to help. So why am I here right now?” She questioned, keeping her tone measured. There was no reason to lose her head. Obviously, Father wasn’t planning on disemboweling her immediately, so why rush her questions? 

“You traveled a long way to be here. I know your intentions in coming here were not to help, but I hope once you see what we have accomplished here, you will change your mind. As for your son, well… I don’t know how to say this. I am your son.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yes, well—“

“You’re old… older than I thought you would be.”

“After I was taken from the cryogenic facility, you were refrozen for a time. More time has passed than you originally thought, I’m afraid.”

She simply stared at him, then looked to the child, then stared back at Father… at _Son?_ Father _was_ son. 

_Tinker Tom is going to absolutely lose his SHIT when I tell him this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to post this on Wednesday, and then I ended up being glued to the news all day. Things are certainly strange in the US, to say the least, and I hope that you all are doing well through it all. If you live near DC, please be safe. Hopefully, this will all resolve peacefully. Even when it's a bit hard to look on the bright side, I hope that you all are finding little joys in the New Year!! Much love to you all!! <3


	20. TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! This chapter contains a lot of personal ideas that I have about Deacon, and how he might experience a sort of dynamic character change. I hope you all enjoy it!! Love you all!! <3

_XX. TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE_

He looked at the bear, then back at the floor. The bear, then the floor. He could drop it right there, in the shadowy dirt that lined the crypt walls below the Old North Church. He could leave it there for the ghouls to find, or he could nestle it below the ribcage of a forgotten skeleton in a musty corner. But he had damn near broken his ribs to find it, and for him to place it anywhere other than directly in Nora’s arms was a waste of his time. He had, after all, specifically found it for her, and he was confident in his claim that she was the only person in the whole wasteland who could properly appreciate it.

This was no regular teddy bear. It was a god-awful ruined teddy bear, smudged with the bioluminescent pollens of a patch of brain fungus, and barely holding onto its one remaining eye. Its fur was matted in places, and where it had once been a soft and comforting tan, it had fallen victim to an ugly sludgy discoloration. While on a solo mission, he had seen it in the corner of a rotted wooden cabin, and had though to himself, “ _If Nora were here, she would snatch that thing up without a second thought. Good thing Nora’s not here, because I would feel guilty about not picking it up if she were here. But I definitely don’t feel guilty about it now, because I’m on my own, and I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to leave it here to rot. Nope, I’m not taking it back to HQ with me, because that would be a burden. I’m leaving it here. Leaving it RIGHT there.”_

And when he had finally lurched forward to collect the pitiful thing, a fully grown Mirelurk burst from under the floorboards, slapping him right across the chest with a wieldy claw. 

So there he was, blood on his white t-shirt and Mirelurk spit on his jeans, cradling a worn out teddy bear right at the door to HQ, considering how he might make it through the main room without alerting his colleagues to his obvious sentimentality.

“That another birthday gift?” Tom questioned from behind him, nearly making Deacon jump out of his skin. He wasn’t sure if he could blush because of the sheer number of surgeries his face had undergone, but he assumed he could, because Tom was cackling at him like a hen as his face heat up.

“No, Tom, it’s a sacrifice.”

“Really? Because that bear has a face only the Professor could love. And come to think of it, so do you, Deeks.”

“I’m going to rip it apart and read its entrails like an augury, Tom,” Deacon swore, but he placed the bear ever so gently on Nora’s mattress and tucked her blanket over top of it, so no one could see. But Glory already _had_ seen it.

“What do you think she’s doing right now, Tom?” Glory asked, slinging her arm over her friend’s shoulder. “I bet she’s kicking someone’s ass. That’s something I have always admired about her— every time I’m looking for her, I always find her kicking someone’s ass. Whose ass do you think she’s kicking right now?”

“I bet she’s kicking an Institute scientist’s ass, Glo,” Tom remarked as the three made their way into the main hub to their checkers table. 

“If she’s not burning in hell, she’s probably not kicking _anybody’s_ ass,” Deacon remarked. “She’s on a stealth mission, not ass-kicking her way through the Institute.”

“That’s a really rude thing to say about your girlfriend, Deacon,” Tom joked, hardly keeping the smile off of his face as he turned away from setting up the board to gaze at his friend with an exaggeratedly serious expression. “Why would she be burning in hell? That’s mean, Deacon.”

“Yeah, if anything, she’s in Valhalla,” Glory cut in, and Deacon had to admit that if anyone in the Railroad was best at deadpanning jokes without cracking even a little bit of a smile, it was Glory. “But seriously, Deeks, she’s not dead. Tom and Sturges both said that the reflector platform worked exactly as it was supposed to, and odds are, she’s in the Institute as we speak, kicking someone’s ass— physically or emotionally.”

_It was 92%. She said it was 92%, and she stepped up on that platform as if it were 0. But that’s stupid, right? No one can tell the future like that. But… it was 92%._

He eventually complied to their demands that he maintain an approximately positive attitude, but something Tom had said suddenly dawned on him.

“Wait, wait, wait, hey— she’s not my girlfriend, Tom. She’s my mission partner.”

“Mmhmm. Okay, Deacon.”

He didn’t have the mental capacity to defend himself, so he opted to take a walk, leaving the little checkers table in favor of wandering the wasteland, picking off Bloatflies and Radroaches as he encountered them. 

As much as he knew he would never regret his friendship with Nora, he knew in the absurdly logical part of his brain that he shouldn’t have gotten so close. He could have worked with her without forming a relationship. He could have comforted her without hugging her, or telling her about his own past, his own hopes and dreams for the future. He could have told her a joke or made fun of himself or given her a playful slap on the arm. 

He didn’t have to be so _emotionally available_ about it. He shouldn’t have been so vulnerable. If she wanted vulnerability, that was on her conscience. She could be as vulnerable as she wanted, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t afford to be vulnerable. 

He had given his entire heart, his entire _life_ to Barbara, and that had turned out to be a mistake.

_It wasn’t a mistake, Deeks,_ said the Nora in his head. He had noticed several months prior that she appeared in his subconscious every now and then, making sure he wasn’t too hard on himself. It should have been annoying, but he appreciated it. He could believe the kind words about himself easier if they were coming from her mouth, speaking to him in her smooth, easy voice. 

_It wasn’t a mistake. You loved her— that’s something you can’t help. You don’t choose to fall in love with someone. No matter how it happened, and no matter what happened in the end, it wasn’t your fault, and you don’t deserve the bad treatment you give yourself._

“Sure, I can buy that, maybe,” he said aloud as he sat down across from the Boston Commons. He could sit there now, because he and Nora had cleared the pond of the behemoth that ravaged the Commons and their surrounding areas. She had even come back with a hazmat suit to clear out the hazardous materials, all the canisters of nuclear material and the radiated sludge in the water. 

She had dragged a broken swan boat out of the corner of the gazebo, yelling dares at him that he couldn’t resist. He had bet her a cold Nuka-Cherry that he could use the boat’s wings to fly over the pond. He didn’t really believe that he could do it, nor did he think that it would end in anything other than him being completely drenched from head to foot, but he also knew that when he inevitably fell from the sky, a disgusted semblance of Icarus with wings of broken swan boats, he would emerge from the sludge of the waters below to see her doubled over in laughter. Even through the metallic voice box of her hazmat suit, her laughter was nothing less than charming, and his insatiable need to keep everyone entertained was in full swing. If he could make her laugh, maybe she would forget that he had once been the scum of the earth.

He also distinctly recalled tagging along on this expedition, despite not even receiving an invitation. She had stated that she was headed out, and he had pulled on a gas mask and followed suit, no questions asked. He wouldn’t have been too surprised if the reflector platform had expanded its wide blue beams of light to grab him straight from the yard like a UFO picking him up in its tractor beam, just because it wasn’t sure what he was doing, standing aside when he could be following her to death’s doorstep.

It seemed that everywhere he went in the Commonwealth, she was there. She had cleared out a building for a group of settlers or planted a tato garden where previously nothing had grown. The entire Commonwealth was indebted to her in some way, but she refused payment for any of it. Every so often, she would accept a couple cans of purified water, or perhaps a carton of cigarettes, but these little gifts would always be given to parched travelers, or to her detective friend in Diamond City. 

“You deserve better,” he mumbled to no one. “You deserve better pay, and you deserve a better partner.”

Ever since their talk in the Glowing Sea, he had felt incredibly self-conscious about himself. Nora wasn’t the cause of this— she would never make him feel bad about himself. If anything, traveling with her had improved his self-image and changed his outlook on a whole lot of things that he had never even considered before. She had a unique brand of pre-war wisdom that made the wasteland a whole lot easier on a whole lot of people, not just him.

But he wasn’t good enough to even be her friend. Deacon was a Railroad spy for a reason— his _troubled_ past and his incessant need to remain a mystery both strongly adhered to his career choices. The last person he had allowed to know him had died in a bloody heap on their front yard.

He could still hear the wretched screams and the jeering of his former friends. They had tied him to the clothesline. Two Deathclaws held his arms and legs, but he kicked and screamed and bit at them, to no avail. Barbara was dead, and it was his fault.

The UP Deathclaws were no longer a threat to him. They had all died out, and good riddance, but the Institute was alive and well, and they already had a hold of Nora. She was inside the Institute as he sat there outside the Commons, doing nothing. 

_I chose to go there, asshat,_ the Nora in his brain chided him. _I went there on purpose. If they rip my arms off, that’s on me. Not on you, you sad bastard. Please stop blaming yourself._

If she had been there in the physical, sat right beside him on the wrought-iron bench as the sun went down, she would have said those words exactly. He knew this because he _knew_ her, and she, despite all blatant warnings, had chosen to _know_ him, and now she was suffering the consequences.

_What the fuck are the consequences? What kind of consequences are you talking about?_

“I’m talking about… I’m talking about _me._ I’m the consequence. The consequence is having to deal with me for the rest of your life, however long that may be.”

Maybe he had misread the entire situation, but from where he stood, the two were teetering dangerously close to something more than partnership, more than friendship. Did he have feelings for her? He wasn’t going to answer that, not even under duress. Had he come down with a severe case of butterflies in his stomach that made him feel like he was fifteen again? Yes, and he might have confused it for a medical emergency had it not happened only when he thought of _her._

_That_ was the consequence. He was emotionally illiterate and stubbornly stupid when it came to anything romantic. If she wanted to make eyes at him, she was going to have to use a battering ram to get in through the front door. 

He stood up from his bench and looked up across the horizon towards C.I.T. He half expected to see it explode into a plume of mushroom-shaped fog, and to see her running from the blast as if she were a superhero in an old film. 

Maybe he was having feelings for her that were beyond friendship, beyond mere physical attraction. She was gorgeous, but that wasn’t the root of his terror. He was in… he was _deeply_ in… _unidentifiable affectionate partnership_ with her. 

_Shit_. 

When she came back from the Institute— he was _sure_ now that she would— he would welcome her back warmly, but he would pry all those little notions out of his hands before he could get any closer to any sort of definable feeling. They would have to remain friends— he was already in too deep to back out of that, and he didn’t want to back out anyway, but _friends_ was where it had to end. If she knew that he had admitted anything of that nature to himself, there would be an inquisition.

Part of him wanted that. Part of him wanted the sheer joy he would feel at being able to finally participate in her vulnerability, the raw honesty she so easily exuded and weaponized at every turn. He _wanted_ to be a part of that. But it wasn’t the right time, or the right place.

When she came back from the Institute, the Railroad would be either running into hiding at the news that that Institute was far more ominous than they suspected, or they would be gearing up for what was probably a suicide mission into the belly of the beast. 

As he walked back in the direction of the Old North Church, he found himself humming a tune— a track from _Hunky Dory_ that Nora had been playing around HQ, on the road, and throughout the streets of Sanctuary. The pride he felt at having given her the _best_ birthday gift far surpassed the worry he felt at his own sentimentality. 

“ _Fill your heart with love today, don’t play the game of time,”_ he sang weakly into the empty air around him. He shoved his hands in his pockets and perched his sunglasses on top of his head. 

The world was kind of beautiful in living color, he thought. When everything wasn’t tinted with a permanent gray from the tint of his glasses, the wasteland showed that it was still able to be beautiful, even in is perpetual ugliness.

“ _Things that happened in the past, only happened in your mind, only in your mind. So forget your mind, and you’ll be free.”_

The ground below him was patterned in a dusky red— the idiosyncratic hue of the Freedom Trail, lining the Boston streets below his feet as he walked. He laughed absentmindedly as he noted the _clues_ Tom had left along the trail’s markers. 

_She was right. ‘Railroad’ isn’t a good password._

“ _The writing’s on the wall. Free, yeah, and you can know it all if you choose.”_

He wished he could walk the Freedom Trail for the first time again. He wished he could start over, force himself to open up. When he had first arrived at the Railroad, back when he had worked at the Switchboard, it was already too late for him. He made no friends, let no one talk to him if the conversation wasn’t about the mission at hand. He lost a lot of people, and it all hurt just the same. It hurt worse, even, when everyone gave their parting words to the dead agents, and he was unable to name a single happy memory with the departed. 

At least he had the comfort of knowing that if Glory died the next day, he would have a thousand stories to tell about how lucky he was to know her. 

“ _Just remember, lovers never lose, ‘cause they are free of thoughts unpure and of thoughts unkind. Gentleness clears the soul, love cleans the mind and makes it free.”_

His voice cracked on the high notes, but no one was around to hear it. 

If Nora didn’t make it back alive, he would have the most stories to tell at her funeral, and he would be proud to share every single one of them. He was done absolving himself of all human connection, as long as it was measured. This was a new era of Deacon, he decided. A cool new shade of Deacon that he would be wearing that season— he wouldn’t be _open_ , just… not so belligerently closed, perhaps.

“ _Happiness is happening, dragons have been bled. Gentleness is everywhere, fear is just in your head, only in your head. Fear is in your head, only in your head—“_

He wouldn’t even change his face to do it. Finally accepting Deacon meant finally being able to look himself in the mirror and recognize that his reflection was an incredibly flawed person with a bounty of redeeming qualities and an emotional support system composed of the best friends a guy could ask for. The wrinkles on his face proved what he had been through, where he had been. The lines that formed around his eyes were from laughter, not from sadness. This face was his own now, and he would keep it, maybe for the rest of his life.

“ _Forget your head, and you’ll be free.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a lot of exciting things happening in the world-- for one, there's an inauguration tomorrow. I'll probably be glued to the news all day, like I have been so often recently. I hope that you all are safe and happy and healthy, and that even in the midst of all the world's business, you are finding some calm and relaxation. Much love to you all!! <3


	21. THE LIFE YOU COULD STILL HAVE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I would like to thank you all, because I recently got to 1000 hits on this story. Now, I am not well-versed in how this website works, or if that is really a big deal or not, but it was a personal goal of mine, and I am so grateful that you all wanted to share in this story with me. This chapter is a bit of introspection as Nora navigates the Institute. I suppose I should have mentioned last chapter that the song is David Bowie's 'Fill Your Heart', which is a wonderful little song that makes me feel better on sad days. Hope you all enjoy!! Love you all!! :) <3

_XXI. THE LIFE YOU COULD STILL HAVE_

She laid flat on her back for the first time in years. She always slept on her side, but the Institute mattresses were so goddamn luscious that it gave her back no grief for her to lay stiff as a board with her arms crossed over her stomach. She probably looked like a corpse, or like the golden visages that marked the lid of a sarcophagus. 

Going back to the dingy mattresses that lined the Railroad’s back entrance would be tough. 

_But what if… I didn’t go back? I could stay here. Shaun… Father told me I could help. That I could be a big part of helping the Commonwealth. Isn’t that what I want?_

But at what cost? She had looked into Nick Valentine’s eyes, seen his heartache. She had tracked a Courser as it blew through Gunners like they were stuffed dolls. She had seen the progress that the Commonwealth could make, and she had seen the regression the Institute had forcefully implemented with its mystery, its mistrust. 

But that bed was so comfortable— comfortable enough to shatter her moral backbone, at least for five more minutes. She would consider it. She would consider the Institute and all the people who worked inside it, and then she would inevitably go back to the Railroad and spill secrets all over Desdemona’s desk. 

After all, revolution is far more exciting than a comfortable bed. 

And after all, she had seen the Institute first hand. She had tentatively agreed when Father… when _Shaun_ had asked her to help the Institute, to eventually join his campaign to restore the Commonwealth to its former glory. Desdemona had told her to work with the Institute until they could establish a route outside of the Institute for safe synth evacuation. 

The Institute was beautiful, and the people inside were brilliant, but Nora had seen no medical or scientific marvels that she thought could justify everything underlying it all. The FEV lab’s old terminals had been stocked with damning information, including condemnations of her own son for infecting innocent Commonwealth citizens with a virulent strain that would turn them into Super Mutants. 

The Institute was responsible for far more than just the creation of the synths. Every scientist employed under Institute guidance was working on broad experimentation, and every one of them had promised Nora a brighter future for the Commonwealth, but in every single department, she had found corruption. She had hacked into terminals, unlocked closet doors, charmed her way into private conversation. 

Father was _lying_ to her. He was lying to his scientists, too, and they were lying to each other. The Institute was built on a sinister network of carefully planned facades.

She had met with Patriot, she had used the scanner, she had done her assigned duties. She had also located Vergil’s serum _and_ her son. On paper, this Institute mission was a complete success. 

But as she stared up at the slate-white ceiling above her, she felt that the whole thing had been a failure. Stealing Shaun hadn’t worked out the way they had planned, and releasing her hadn’t either. Father thought that he was successfully indoctrinating her, but she was merely another dancer in the elaborate masquerade. 

And most of all, the people of the Commonwealth suffered the direct consequences of the Institute’s actions. That was the gravest sin Nora had witnessed. 

The people who inhabited the wasteland were not a single demographic with similar dreams for the future. Their intentions were myriad, and not all of them good, but they were survivors, every single one of them. She hadn’t looked into the eyes of a single raider and seen complete moral disillusionment. There was a great deal of trauma that came along with living in a desolate world, and it affected even the most violent and reckless among them. 

She would return to the Railroad, and she would destroy the Institute. There was no other option. And it was not for Desdemona specifically, or for the Railroad as a whole. It was not for the unattainable idea of _revolution_ or brotherhood. Freedom from the Institute would be for the people of the Commonwealth, and they could choose what they wanted to do with it.

They were, after all, the ones caught up in the midst of it all. She remembered her first few weeks in the wasteland alone, and how much they had taught her about the Commonwealth’s people. The Abernathy family, the packs of traveling scavengers, even the raiders— everyone who claimed status as a Commonwealth citizen had proved to her that the world was still alive after years of radiation and nuclear desolation. 

When her eyes shut that night, she fell asleep near instantly with the creak in her spine eased by the plush mattress in her Institute room. She hadn’t been able to relax that afternoon— there was something too anti-septic about the room, something too much like a hospital. But as soon as she had laid down to sleep, she found that she didn’t mind the hospital-feel as long as the bed was that soft.

The passage into a dream was easy and light, and the dream itself was spun thick and bright like a cocoon of cotton candy that would give her tooth-rot if she spent too long there. 

Sanctuary Hills was a bright and beautiful place, after all, even in dreams, and the morning rays that shone through the pristine glass windows by the breakfast table illuminated two clean glasses of pure white milk and crisply toasted bread with marmalade— and the best part was that none of it would give her radiation poisoning. She would sit and eat and continue with the rest of her day with no foul stirring of her stomach. 

Nate was eyeing her above the corner of his newspaper, ever the vigilant citizen, with his roughened smile warming her cheeks. This was not the Nate she had known. This was dream-Nate. This was Nathan Woodring, who had taken her by the hand and promised to love her so intensely she could hardly stand it. Nathan Woodring, who laughed with her in the late night hours and danced with her in their living room even when no music played. This was saccharine Nate, sweet-rotten Nate. 

There was a knock at the door, and she rose to answer it, her husband’s glance tracing her figure as she stepped on light feet to the front door. The sounds of the neighborhood suddenly filled the living room with a tranquil domesticity.

“Mrs. Woodring?” The salesman inquired with a tip of his hat. “I’m a representative with Vault-Tec, here to give you the good news! I’m glad you answered the door, because this is a matter of utmost importance.”

“Utmost importance, huh?” She heard her own voice speak, dreamy and cool. Her honey-voiced dream-self shook the salesman’s hand cordially. 

“I’m pleased to inform you that you and your family have been selected for entry into the local vault— Vault 111. We can ensure your placement after you answer a few simple questions.”

“Of course.”

“Alright, question one: how long have you lived in Sanctuary Hills?”

“All my life, that’s 27 years.”

“What a full and charming life you must lead! Question two: who is the most important person in your life?”

“That would be Dea— or, my husband, I suppose,” she returned, though her mind lingered on the image of Deacon she had conjured. He didn’t exist in that world, wouldn’t exist for another 200 years, and yet there he was, sat serenely in the corner of her mind. She turned her gaze away from the salesman to gaze at her shoes as they made little heeled indents in the carpet. 

“You should always go with your first instinct for that question.”

She did not even realize that the chipper tone of the salesman’s voice had become lower, thicker. She did not even realize that he was staring at her so intensely that had she looked at him, she might have awoken. 

“Well, just a slip of the tongue. Go on, sir.”

“Are you happy here?”

“Yes.”

“Are you _really?”_

“I don’t see why that—“ she began in accusation of the man. He had the audacity to come to her house, promise her safety from _total atomic annihilation_ , then insist that perhaps she wasn’t as happy as she thought. She wanted to tell him this, but when her head twisted upwards to fully meet his gaze, the salesman was no longer there. He had been replaced by—

“Nora, are you happy here? Don’t you want to, I don’t know, get out of here? Do something cool?”

“Deacon, I—“

“C’mon, boss. He’s no good for you, look at him. Come with me. We’ll travel the world, the non-exploded parts of it, at least. We’ll shoot some bad guys, and then—“

“And then what, Deacon? We keep working for eternity? We set out every two days on a new mission and never quit until something kills us or we keel over? What then?”

“Well, I was thinking we could go to Appalachia, maybe. Visit that Mothman Museum you always heard about pre-war. Or, we could go to the Capital Wasteland, build a farm, listen to classic rock all day long in the sun. I promised I’d take you there, and I’ll still do it, but it seems like you’re not interested now.”

“Deacon.”

“It’s a limited time offer.”

“Of course that’s where I want to go. I’m not happy here.”

He smiled, lovingly. Lovingly and warmly. And she felt, even in her dream, that she was loved, that she was precious to someone. Her chest swelled at the sight of him, clipboard discarded, yellow Vault-Tec hat thrown to the ground, _appreciating_ her with wild abandon. She prayed for the dream to keep going, for him to sweep her up across the threshold and carry her right out of the neighborhood, over the bridge, past the Red Rocket, and right into a new life.

But the dream wasn’t kind enough to her to do that. Her eyelids fluttered open, and Deacon was not there. She was in the Institute, alone, and he was at HQ, probably sketching out emotional avoidance strategies in his free time. She felt a stray tear fall to her pillow, and she suddenly felt embarrassed of herself.

To ease her mind, she pulled her favorite holotape from the pocket of her crisp, vibrant-smelling Institute jumpsuit and played it as she turned on the shower. 

She always preferred a hot bath when her bones ached and her mind was restless, but the Institute’s bathrooms did not allow such accommodations. She mentally added that to her list of their sins, but the hot water erased it from her mind.

“ _Fill your heart with love today, don’t play the game of time,”_ she sung along to the music that filled the little room. 

Everything in the Institute smelled so incredibly _good._ She held in her hands a bar of soap that had come in a crisp white paper packaging with little bright lavender leaves patterning the front and sides of it. Lavender had always been a favorite scent of hers— she wondered absentmindedly if Father knew that, if that was why this particular soap had been neatly stacked on her bathroom sink. 

She didn’t care what Father knew about her. 

He could know all he wanted to know, and he _still_ wouldn’t know her. Her favorite soap had nothing to do with her. It was as meaningless as knowing whether she had long hair or short hair or no hair at all. It wouldn’t change anything, in the grand scheme of things.

Father wanted to make a big deal about knowing all these little things about her, and she let him believe that he was impressive, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not see the private thoughts she held in her heart. 

“ _Things that happened in the past only happened in your mind, only in your mind. So forget your mind, and you’ll be free.”_

If he was listening to her at that very moment, so what? He was allowed to know the lyrics to her favorite songs, but he could never know how it made her _feel._

That was possibly the most pertinent flaw of the Institute. It knew so much, and it felt so little. That might have worked before the war, but the wasteland did not conform to the theories of the old world. 

“ _The writing’s on the wall. Free, yeah, and you can know it all, if you choose.”_

She felt two hundred years of dirt and grime and radiation melt off of her under the hot water. It was like her last meal. This would be the first shower she had in so long, and yet, it would be the last hot shower she would probably experience for the rest of her life, so she used it wisely. 

“ _Just remember, lovers never lose, ‘cause they are free of thoughts unpure and of thoughts unkind. Gentleness clears the soul, love cleans the mind and makes it free.”_

She closed her eyes and held her head directly under the water’s stream, letting the little droplets pelt her face until she felt all her muscles relax. She hadn’t noticed how tense her jaw was, how clenched she kept her teeth. For a moment, it was nice to know that she wasn’t under attack at every second. It was nice to open her eyes and see clear water falling above her. The Institute’s building was nice, if nothing else. Perhaps they didn’t have to blow up the whole thing. Maybe the Railroad could just evict the old inhabitants and spend the rest of their lives taking hot showers and playing games with synth gorillas. 

Synth gorillas— now that was something Nora distinctly hated. She had no hatred for gorillas in general, but the Institute was playing god by making them into synths. That would surely give her nightmares for years to come, but it would be a fun story to tell back at HQ. 

“ _Happiness is happening, dragons have been bled. Gentleness is everywhere, fear is just in your head, only in your head. Fear is in your head, only in your head—“_

She ran her fingers through her wet hair, feeling for the first time just how long it had gotten. She had considered getting a haircut in Diamond City— some style that would catch less raider blood. She hadn’t done it in the end, for a reason that embarrassed her a bit. Her face flushed red, and she blamed it on the water pressure.

She had pulled her hair down from a quick bun after a firefight, letting it fall around her face. It was greasy and damp and flecked with Bloatfly guts, and Deacon had made a passing comment.

_“Your hair looks real nice like that.”_

_“Oh yeah? I’m pretty sure there’s a live larva in it. That’s a nice accessory, huh?”_

_“Yeah, really accentuates the color. It does look pretty, though, larva aside. You look nice with long hair.”_

_“I haven’t cut it in 200 years, so I should hope so.”_

They had laughed it off, as they usually did. Humor was an indubitable strength in their relationship. She wished Deacon were there to see all the beautiful things in the Institute. She half expected to see him sitting sprawled out on the bed when she finally exited the shower with a sinfully soft towel wrapped around her. But he wasn’t, so she would have to go find him herself.

“ _So forget your head, and you’ll be free.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sincerely hope that you all are doing well. My mental health hasn't been great as of late, because the world just feels so strange, but I am learning that there are so many little things to notice to keep me going. I hope that you are doing well mentally, physically, and emotionally, and that you can find joy even in such strange times. Much love to you all!! <3


	22. COMMON TONGUE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! I hope that you are all doing well!! There's been rainy weather where I live, and it's making the inside of my house feel awfully cozy. I hope that you all are feeling cozy as well, and I hope that if anyone reading this lives in Texas or has friends or family there, that you are safe and well and protected from the elements. Much love to you all!! <3

_XXII. COMMON TONGUE_

If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that she _fucking hated_ teleportation. The sci-fi movies she had watched pre-war had made it look so cool, so interesting. It fucking hurt, and she didn’t feel cool _at all._

She did have to admit that the automatic transporter Dr. Li had programmed into her pip-boy was significantly less painful than the reflector platform Tom and Sturges had helped her build in Sanctuary, but it still jarred her terribly. 

She ended up in a pile in PAM’s office, groaning softly as her body hit the crypt floor.

“Agent Professor,” PAM announced in her same unenthusiastic tone. “Sudden arrival not predicted. Recalculating models based on new information.”

“Thanks, PAM.”

By that point, Glory had rushed into PAM’s office and was helping Nora stand, shouldering her weight as she hobbled into the main hub of HQ.

“She’s back!” Glory yelled across the lobby, as if every head hadn’t already turned to watch them, as if half the population of Railroad HQ wasn’t already running towards Nora at breakneck speed. “Woah, woah, give the lady some space. She just popped into existence, don’t crowd her.”

Nora dropped her entire weight onto the couch and waited silently for the agents to fill in the space around her. She didn’t want to give the whole story fifty times over, so the easiest way for her to get any rest that night was to say it all at once, to everyone at once.

“Welcome back, Professor,” Des finally crooned. Nora noted with interest that Des didn’t have a cigarette— a rarity, and a bit of a worrying sight. 

“Hi, Des. Quit smoking, have you?”

“Very funny. I take a five minute break from chain-smoking, and everyone decides to make jokes at my expense. You’re all fired if this keeps up.” A delightful rumble of laughter eased over the crowd before they all remembered who was sitting on the couch. 

“The transporter worked! I knew it!” Tom pumped his fist into the air excitedly, and Drummer Boy gave him a proud clap on the back. “Tell me: what did they look like inside the Institute? Little green men? Humanoids? Is _everybody_ a synth there?”

“No aliens as far as I’m aware, but they do have synth gorillas.”

“Holy shit… that changes _everything!”_ Tom ran off to his terminal and began rapidly clacking at the keys. 

“I met with Patriot, and Z1. We have a plan. As long as I can collect a couple pieces of intel for him, there’s a good chance we can get some synths out of there.”

“Once you’ve had a chance to rest,” Des spoke, “You can type up the report in detail on PAM’s terminal. We’ll make a plan from there. Good job, Professor. The Railroad is in your debt.”

“No need to thank me, Des. I would’ve done it either way,” Nora swore. The agents milled about HQ, returning to their work with little interest, as they had already experienced the most exciting event that would happen that day. Glory stood by the couch with a stimpak at the ready, claiming that they needed to be prepared in case the Institute had infected Nora with any futuristic diseases. 

“You never know what they’re really up to,” Glory assured her. “I should know, I was there once too. There’s always something sinister afoot.”

“That’s a very poetic way to say it, Glo. Speaking of poetic, where’s Deacon?”

“Went for a walk a couple hours ago. He’s been doing that almost every day since you evaporated. He’s experiencing teen angst for possibly the first time in his life.”

“Thanks, Glo.”

Nora suspected she knew where he was, but she didn’t tell Glory where she was headed. Ever since she had cleared out the Boston Commons, Deacon had taken a particular liking to the little park, always talking about how much he would have liked to see it in its prime. It was her goal to one day restore it to something close to its hay-day, if a little more radiated. 

“What the _fuck_ are you doing here?” She yelled across the pond as she approached the bench where he sat, glasses on his head and eyes staring blankly at the dead grass. “I zapped into existence right in the middle of PAM’s office, and you weren’t even there to greet me, you selfish asshole!”

She tried to keep up her serious facade, but she couldn’t even pretend to be angry with him as he stood up from the bench, looking at her as if she might not even be real, and running towards her anyway. She didn’t have time to brace herself before the impact of his forceful embrace. He picked her up fully off the ground and spun her around once, twice, thrice before she begged him to put her down.

“I’m not used to being back in reality just yet,” she mumbled, her hand cradling her spinning head. “Jesus, Deeks. You didn’t miss me at all, huh?”

“It wasn’t the same without you,” he responded. He had left his glasses on the bench, and she reveled in the sight of him, standing casually as though he hadn’t just nearly burst a blood vessel. “I tried playing our travel games by myself, but 20 Questions isn’t the same when your only opponent is the smartest, handsomest man on the planet. I can’t imagine how you must feel every time we play.”

“Hmm. I somehow manage. Sit with me.”

He complied, taking his position back on the bench beside the pond. There was a pigeon standing in the shallow edge of the water, pecking at little bugs that skimmed the surface. It would have been like a normal summer afternoon, had the pigeon not had two heads.

“How was the Institute?”

“Very _clean._ There wasn’t a single spec of dust down there. And the water’s clear, too. It’s not bad, if you don’t pay attention to the slavery and corruption and general sycophancy.”

“Sounds delightful. Did you… did you find him? Your son?” He asked, not even daring to look at her. She hummed in thought as she tried to collect her thoughts. She would tell him everything, certainly, but she wondered where exactly to start, and how exactly to say it.

“The Institute’s director… he’s called _Father_. They call him that because the synths were patterned after his DNA. That’s why the Gen 3s are so lifelike. Father is older now— in his sixties, I’d say. But still, every single new synth is made based on him. They needed… they needed an untouched specimen. Someone who had never been exposed to the wasteland.”

“Father is…”

“Shaun. Father is my son,” she said with a rueful laugh. “They took him, and they refroze me. I missed sixty years of his life on ice. I don’t really even know how to feel about it. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t laugh— I just had to accept it, you know? There was nothing I could do about it, so there was nothing I could say.”

“Father is your son,” he mused aloud. It would be incredibly funny, if it were not so deeply tragic. Perhaps one day they would laugh about it, but that day, all they could do was let it be.

“He wants me to help the Institute. He wants to… _employ_ me, I guess, but I’m not going to agree, of course. I told him that I would help, just so I can have an excuse to be there. The mission, you know.”

“Right, the mission. How was that part of the trip?”

She picked at the splitting ends of her shoelaces bashfully, grateful that he had taken the time to ask about her personal affairs before getting straight to work. No one at HQ had mentioned her son. She understood why— it was an awkward topic, and she couldn’t expect her colleagues to want to undertake the entire emotional burden of her tragic backstory. The fact that Deacon was willing to shoulder any of it was admirable.

She found her left hand wandering towards his right, where it sat tapping out a nervous rhythm on his knee. He froze as she grasped his hand but settled as her grip grew tighter. She needed this touch, and she wasn’t going to let him go. 

“The mission went well,” she elaborated. His thumb ran absentmindedly across the soft skin on the back of her hand, lulling her into a tired rhythm. “I’ve given PAM and Des the details, and they’ll get back to me once they’ve gone over everything. I suppose I’ll have to get in first and then let you all in. I think that you’d like it there, Deeks. It’s really beautiful.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s got these high ceilings that are tiered, like a big white wedding cake,” she started. He had no real concept of what a wedding cake really looked like, but he imagined it was pretty. “It’s pretty plain, to be honest. No art or pictures or colors, but they have different departments, and the department signs all glow with nice neon colors. Like Valentine’s sign outside the agency, but bigger and brighter, and they don’t give out every time someone flushes a toilet.”

“Sounds nice, boss.”

“Speaking of toilets, the Institute toilets are so clean, and not a single one of them is missing a lid. Every single toilet has a lid. They flush clockwise, too. Really interesting tidbit.”

In the middle of her ramblings about the toilets, her voice broke. Why it took her until she reached the bit about the toilets to start feeling the need to cry, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps there was something in her subconscious that felt particularly strongly about the toilets, or perhaps it was just that she was sitting beside a man who had never once in his life seen a proper, functioning bathroom, and she was feeling guilty about it. 

“I’ll have to find an excuse to go to the bathroom when we go to blow the thing up. That is the plan, I assume?”

She nodded silently. He considered making a joke or pinching her side, something to make her laugh, but they had done enough laughing, and they would certainly have time for more. Now was a time for crying. She was holding back, and that was something he rarely saw her do. So he made the decision to help her cry, instead of hindering it.

“Tell me a secret.”

This was a practice they had begun in the weeks following their talk in the Glowing Sea. Perhaps it was the looming inevitability that they would be making a dangerous play against the Institute, one which may well kill the both of them. They let all their little truths unravel, in case one or both of them ended up dead—a wildly affectionate transaction between two people who were so uncertain of displaying true affection. 

“I didn’t like Shaun when he was first born.”

“Babies don’t know how to do anything cool.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But it was more than that. I didn’t want a baby, and I was really unhappy in my marriage. So when Shaun was born, and I was supposed to be the one taking care of him, I felt like an imposter.”

“I assume you changed your mind, since you kicked a few thousand asses to find him.”

“Yeah, I suppose. He became a confidant, of sorts. A baby can’t rat you out to your husband. And when he wasn’t shitting compulsively, he was kind of cute. I realized that ever since he was born, I had been assuming he would end up just like his father, but I forgot that he was also _my son._ I could raise him better than that, if I wanted to.”

“And now?”

“Now, I can’t help but be proud of him, even though he’s an actual mad scientist. He did something that he thought was helping. He’s a little bit of a megalomaniac, but he’s a megalomaniac whose butt I used to wipe, so it’s weird to see him as anything other than… my son. My successful, brilliant son.”

“That makes sense. Have you told him that you used to wipe his butt? That could be a useful weapon against the Institute. Sheer embarrassment.”

“Hmm, maybe I should. They even— they made a synth version of him, only younger. I don’t know if it was to trick me, or if he’s just a narcissist, but it was… _freaky._ Just about ten years old. I know that he’s technically a replica of my son, that he won’t grow up, but he’ll lookthe exact same as my _real_ son, my _biological_ son, but it’s just not him. The little baby that I’ve spent so much time looking for… he’s just gone. It’s like he disappeared, or never even existed in the first place. It might sound horrible, but I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to feel about that little synth boy the same way I felt about _Shaun._ ”

There was silence for a few moments before she continued, “He’s dying, you know. The older Shaun is. He’s sick. They can’t cure him. So if we take down the Institute— I mean, if we blow the whole thing up— I won’t feel too guilty about leaving him there.”

The admission turned her stomach, and she felt the acrid sting of bile climbing her throat. She wouldn’t say anymore. She would have to wait for Deacon to continue the conversation, because anything she said would come out as puke. 

She hardly even felt it when he deftly lifted her hand to his face, pressing a feather-light kiss to her knuckles and staring at her profile as she continued looking into the pond as if it were a scrying mirror, praying it would show her the future she wanted to see.

“Nora, you have every right to feel whatever you need to feel. You said it yourself. The wasteland doesn’t have a moral compass. You’re the bravest one of us, and if anybody tells you how you should feel, you have every right to beat the shit out of them.”

And she wept. 

It felt good to weep, and she didn’t feel embarrassed, just good. Sometimes, good was enough. She had gotten caught up in too many complex emotions for her to properly be aware of herself, and for once, it was exactly proper to weep and feel good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a bit of good news this week. My old job, which shut down temporarily last March, has started up again, so now I have my job back! It's incredibly exciting for me. I work in childcare, and I've really missed it. I'm also eligible to be vaccinated now, which is wonderful news. In light of all of my good news, I hope that you all encounter lots of good news. We all need a little more good news!! Love you all!! <3


	23. NEW HIRES, OLD HAUNTS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my friends!! This is one of my favorite chapters that I've written, simply because I love the Cambridge Polymer Labs quest so, so much. I think the whole thing is so much fun, and pretty funny too. That being said, I hope you all enjoy reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I hope that you all are having a lovely March!! Love you all!! <3

_XXIII: NEW HIRES, OLD HAUNTS_

“Now _this_ is the kind of work I’m really good at.”

“What do you mean?”

“Undercover work, duh. I didn’t put my wig back on for _nothing,_ ” Deacon had said as soon as the two had reached the front doors of Cambridge Polymer Labs, where PAM had promised them favorable odds of finding specific credentials necessary to enter the Institute’s older terminal programs. 

Deacon had swept open the front door and held it open for his comrade, flourishing with an exaggerated twist of his hand for her to enter. Later that very day, however, he was singing a different tune. 

“You’re just bitter because Molly gave you a janitor’s uniform, and _I_ got a lab coat,” Nora sang as she strapped a gas mask to her face. She wasn’t sure what had been going on in Cambridge Polymer Labs before the war, or what exactly _polymer_ was, but it was something she didn’t want in her body. Her Geiger counter assured her of that.

“No, I’m bitter because I thought that we might get to pretend to be new employees. There are no employees here, just ghouls.”

As if right on cue, a feral ghoul jumped from the shadows and leeched onto Deacon’s neck. Nora managed to kill it with a shot right in between the eyes before it could use its decaying teeth to bite into his skin.

“What happens if one of those things bites you, Deeks? I’ve always wondered that.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure. Though, I have disguised myself as one. Not my brightest idea, but the disguise was seamless.”

Nora hummed her slight incredulity on the subject before kicking open another laboratory door. They had already found the password at least thirty minutes ago. Now, they were completing a centuries-old science project just so they could be let out of the building. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but Molly had flashed her rotating saw at them when they tried kicking the door down. 

“We could just shoot her,” Deacon had whispered to Nora as they had stared at the robot through the blurry glass windows that led to the decontamination chamber. “That would be quicker.”

“We’re not going to shoot her. I think she’s very nice, and I would feel bad about it. Wouldn’t you? And c’mon, it’s a science lab. We can pretend to be actual, real-life scientists. I _know_ you’re not about to tell me that you don’t want to complete a top-secret pre-war science project.”

“…Yeah, you’re right. I’ve never met a female Mr. Handy. Miss Handy? Mrs. Handy? Are they married in the ancient robot lore?”

“Miss Nanny.”

“That sounds a little… sexist.”

“Yeah, that’s how everything was back then.”

Nora plugged a metal canister into the holding compartment and checked the computer for its validity. They had found the two main materials they needed for the synthesis— what it was they were synthesizing, they didn’t know— but now they needed something else.

“A radioactive isotope,” Nora mused, and Deacon shrugged as he strapped his rifle over his back. “It says it’s in containment. Oh, I bet it’s in that room that makes my Geiger go crazy.”

“Hmm, that sounds really nice. Exactly the kind of place I like to go.”

She put in a manual override in the terminal that would open the door to the radioactive chamber for them and then made sure to double check the tightness of her gas mask’s straps. They would leave marks on her face, but a few disappearing dents in her skin were ultimately better than the mass scarification of becoming a ghoul. She reached up to pull on Deacon’s as well before the two stepped through the doorway.

“Oh my god, the pool’s glowing. That’s so cool,” she noted, her voice picking up a metallic thrum through the vents of her mask. “How many caps will you give me if I jump in?”

“I will give you zero caps. In fact, I will require caps _from you._ If you jump in, you will have to pay me.”

“… How much would I have to pay you?”

“Twenty caps.”

Without another word, Nora shoved her laser rifle into Deacon’s hands and took a running leap towards the water. As her body hit the still surface of the water, he noticed that the water that overflowed onto the floor beside him was _not_ glowing. In fact, the water itself seemed to be simply illuminating the uncertain form of a glowing mass under the waves now rippling from the epicenter of her jump. 

“I think that was worth losing twenty caps,” she assured him, pushing her hands flat atop the concrete pool side and shaking her head like a wet dog. The glowing mass began to stir beneath her, shaping its way upward towards the leg of her black pants. 

“Nora, I don’t think—“ Deacon began, but before he could warn her, a wretched arm had snaked its ruined fingers around her leg and was pulling her body back into the pool. She let out a shriek that mellowed to a harsh gargle as her mouth was filled with pool water. Her head was submerged in the blink of an eye. He would have intervened much sooner, but it seemed to happen so fast that when he finally lurched forward, her body had been dragged to the bottom of the pool by what he knew now was a Glowing One.

Without a second thought, he was in the water too, trying to fight off the ghoul with his bare hands. If he could get her out of the pool, at least, then they could properly deal with their new enemy. Nora drowned and unconscious was not any help in a fight. Luckily for the both of them, she was still kicking, the vents of her gas mask letting out clouds of little bubbles as she screamed through her mask. 

Finally, the Glowing One released its grip, and the two floated to the surface. Deacon quickly turned around to put a few dozen bullets through the ghoul’s body before falling to the ground beside Nora, who had taken off her gas mask to hack the water out of her lungs. She would have to take an extra dose of Rad-Away, but it was better that she get the water out now and worry about the radiation later. 

“That’s gonna cost you more than twenty caps,” he quipped as she sat upright and tucked her knees to her chest. 

Her mouth opened to say something, but before she could speak, she spat another puddle of water on the ground. “Fair enough.”

The two stared in silence at the dead ghoul lying face down in the pool water, waiting until the waves finally stilled to make sure that the thing was dead. The water soaking their clothes began to give them chills, but despite the increasing discomfort of their position, Deacon began laughing. Nora turned to him in horror, at first, but gradually caught on to the joke herself. 

It _was_ funny, after all. In hindsight, it was _hilarious._ It had terrified the both of them while it was happening, but now, it was all just a pleasant memory, and hopefully, a cautionary tale.

“Tell you what, Deacon.”

“Tell me what.”

“Let’s go to Goodneighbor tonight, hmm?”

“We celebrating something?”

“Do we have to be? I haven’t had a drink in over 200 years. I just got dragged to the bottom of a radioactive swimming pool by a Glowing One. If anything calls for a drink, I think that’s it.”

He nodded his assent, not letting on exactly how excited he was. As much time as he had spent in Goodneighbor, he hadn’t made his way into the Rail more than a handful of times, and if anywhere was a good place for laying low, it was Goodneighbor. He wanted a drink, he wanted a break, and he wanted to just sit down and talk to someone about anything other than Railroad business for five minutes, at least. The weather, politics, _dirt._

Besides, Nora was a hoot when she was sober. He had a nagging curiosity to see what she was like tipsy. 

“You know, you look good with hair,” she said, breaking the silence as they finally stood, taking the radioactive isotope from the shelf and carrying it back to the synthesis machine. “When was the last time you grew your hair out?”

“I’ve never had hair. Been bald since I was a wee babe.”

“That’s weird, because Tom _swears_ he saw you singing ‘Sixty Minute Man’ while shaving your head the other day. Guess it was a ghost.”

“ _Shit.”_

As his face turned beet red, he was glad for her focus on the synthesis machine, which was now producing a series of beeps and whines as it rumbled into action for the first time in centuries. The conveyer belt moved slowly on its rusty wheels, but surely enough, something _was_ being synthesized. 

“I haven’t had hair in… five years now? I don’t even remember what it looks like, to be honest.”

“Well, you should grow it out,” she remarked simply. She reached her hand up to touch the stubble that barely stood out atop his head. “I think you’d look good if your hair was… just about _there._ ” Her hand dropped to mark a spot just below his earlobe. A little longer than his hair had ever been, but he wouldn’t call it unruly. It was something to consider, at least, and he would consider it _strongly_ as soon as she wasn’t so goddamn close to him, just barely brushing her finger against his earlobe. 

“You think so, huh?” He muttered weakly, and she stepped away. He wasn’t _relieved_ by the sudden absence of her hand on his skin— in fact, he found himself missing the feeling of it— but he could certainly breathe normally again. 

“Yeah, I think so. I think your eyes would look nice with your kind of reddish hair, too.”

“And how the hell do you know what color my hair is, boss?”

“You don’t shave your eyebrows, Deeks.”

The synthesis machine had finished its work, and it had now seemingly shut down for good, as a little plume of steam poured from a place Nora assumed steam should not be present. She lifted the product— a shiny new power armor chest piece— into her arms and headed for the door. 

Molly was pleased to see the result of their scientific endeavors, not noticing at all that her two new employees were soaking wet to the bone, opting instead to rush them to the director’s office. The director _wasn’t_ pleased to see them.

As they exited the front door, the sun hit their soaking clothes, making the fabric all too heavy and dreary under the summer heat. Nora removed her coat, making sure to squeeze all the excess out of the sleeves— Kent had spent so long stitching special armor into the sleeves, and she wasn’t about to squander his hard work.

“Well, that was fun,” Nora spoke, turning away from her partner to tuck her coat into her bag. “Sucks that we got laid off, though. I was hoping to go back into work tomorrow. What about you?”

When she turned back to Deacon, he was standing in the sun, his soaked wig dripping strands of black hair down by his ears, and she suddenly found herself unable to say anything else. He pulled his glasses from his face and examined them from a distance, noting the little beads of water that caught the sunlight. She wasn’t sure what it was, but something about the waning afternoon sun made her feel suddenly romantic. 

“You good, boss?” Deacon asked as he scrubbed the lenses of his sunglasses with a dry patch of t-shirt. 

“I’m good, Deacon. You good?” The words did not come to her mouth easily, but she was grateful, at least, that she had said words at all.

If this were pre-war, she would have arrived at Natalie Hawthorne’s house the next morning, poured herself a hot cup of hot chocolate, and tried to explain all the different things she felt. But Natalie Hawthorne was not there. Deacon was there, and he was looking at her with a curious expression. 

_So, he’s not a bad looking guy. No big deal. I just can’t stare. Nora, don’t stare. Nora, stop fucking staring!_

“You like what you see, boss?”

_Jesus Christ._

Nora mentally cleared a two-hour block in her schedule for that evening. She was going to craft a makeshift ouija board, and she was going to summon Natalie Hawthorne’s ghost for advice on what she should do next, given that she had realized that she had somehow gotten herself irrevocably emotionally entangled with her coworker. That was the only logical route from that point on.

“Fuck you, Deacon.”

“Hey, you give me a time and place, boss. But not tonight— I’m going to Goodneighbor with a friend tonight.”

“Oh, good. Maybe I’ll finally get some peace and quiet.”

She was in trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's so strange that it's already March again-- I feel like last March was just a couple weeks ago, at most. I hope you all are staying safe and healthy, and that you are finding peace and happiness in your everyday life. Much love to you all!! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, folks! This is the first chapter, and all the other chapters are already written. I'll probably post once a week at least, as long as my school schedule doesn't kill me. This is my first fanfic, and I wrote it for fun and comfort in these -unprecedented times- so I hope you can find some fun and comfort in it as well. That being said, please be gentle with me as I figure out how to use this website and my corresponding tumblr page.   
> I don't know if this is still a thing people do, but back in my hay-day of reading fanfic on ao3, everyone wrote at the end that they didn't own the characters or story or anything. I don't own any of this except a digital copy of the game, if that counts for anything.  
> Also, here's a little list of songs that I listened to while writing this chapter:   
> Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows//Lesley Gore  
> No Children//The Mountain Goats   
> Life on Mars?//David Bowie  
> (Prepare for more Bowie songs in the future. I can't resist.)  
> Let me know if you like this chapter, or if you want to see more!! Love you <3


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